Experience VR using the Myo armband

developerblog.myo.com

9 points·LegendaryTeeth··3 comments

Initially I assumed that this was just an accelerometer, but actually the device detects hand motions by detecting electric impulses from the skin.

That's really exciting - even if it can only detect fairly gross gestures, it opens up all kinds of applications! When developers get hold of these kits we could see some really cool stuff.

I own an early kit, and got to play around with a more recent one a bit ago too. Sadly, my experience wasn't very positive. The API felt super restricted, and it didn't seem like it was improving much.

[edit] Additional details: it's extremely limited in which gestures it detects. At the time I used it, it could detect a relaxed hand, a clenched fist, a wave outward, and curled fingers in an "O" shape. There may have been one or two that I forgot, but it wasn't many at all. Additionally, it could tell if you were rotating your hand clockwise or counter-clockwise. The detection of the gestures wasn't great. I found myself having to very deliberately move my hand into variations on these basic gestures until it picked up on them. The degree to which it picked up on gestures got drastically worse if I lowered the band on my arm to relieve the pressure (the band was quite snug).

The combination of being limited to a very few specific gestures and the poor accuracy of the device just left me feeling very disappointed.

Ideally, you'd want access to the underlying data, and some tools for working with it... sad although there might be some technical reason like they don't stream all the data back over the wireless link.

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