Combining Myo, Minuum and Google Glass

A few projects have been surfacing that hint that in the near future we probably won’t be walking around the world, looking down and poking at 4″ touchscreens. Follow the sequence below…

Meet Minuum – a project to linearise the keyboard and in doing so allow it to easily be mapped to new inputs.

Now meet Myo – an armband that lets you use the electrical activity in your muscles for gesture control. Unlike the Leap it doesn’t require your hand to be in front of a camera for it to pick up your gestures and is therefore more appropriate for when you are not behind your desk. Mapping minor gestures to a new type of keyboard, like Minuum above, is a good use case.

And we all know Glass – the wearable, head-mounted display from Google X Lab, that (relevant to this use case) has been criticized for the potential awkwardness of voice commands in urban or noisy environments.

Stick these three together and you have a new immersive, yet discreet, way of interacting technology, where one can use gestures to type messages, control actions, and interact with the world around us. This type of interaction has shown up before, in the form of a MIT Media Lab project called SixthSense, consisting of a projector and camera that hangs around your neck. It projects a display onto everyday objects you encounter, using the camera to recognize hand gestures by tracking color markers on your fingers. But two fundamental things will be different:

• Instead of requiring a surface to project onto, the display becomes more personal and versatile for everyday applications. Only you can see it and it’s overlayed in the top corner of your eye – there when you need it.
• Instead of measuring your hand moving in physical space with a camera, one can measure the intent of moving your hand through electromyography. This means gestures can be more subtle and potentially more accurate as you can map commands directly to nerve signals, measuring closer to the source.

The specifics of this new model for how we carry around and interact with technology will probably vary. Having an actual projection may in some cases be useful, as well as less costly than Google Glass. Minuum are even working on hardware themselves, such as rings, bands and other wearable technology, which will most likely also use EMG signals and accelerometers.

However any other combinations will probably result in the same general outcome: mapping basic movements to an interface in a way that the technology is no longer just contained within one device but spread across a few seamlessly integrated systems. This is a pretty good example of the trend of ubiquity (think invisible omnipresence) in computing that we’ll see more of in the future. 

The market winner will be the one that manages to combine this tech into a persuasive and complete product, designing an interaction that manages to avoid the “Segway effect” thats bound to come with a new technology that involves you wearing strange headsets or making weird movements in public, no matter how inconspicious they are.