Thalmic Labs, maker of the gesture control wristband Myo, may be developing a new VR wristband controller that can sense the position of a user's finger. The company is currently demonstrating a new product after completing a $120 million Series B round of financing.
Yesterday Xiaobian reported that Thalmic Labs received some 120 million U.S. dollars worth of venture capital investment, including Intel Capital, the Amazon Alexa Fund, and Fidelity Investments Canada. This round of investment will help them realize their vision for the next computing era. In this new era, the boundaries between humans and digital technologies will become extremely blurred.
Thalmic Labs's first product, the Myo Wristband, did not achieve the desired results, nor did it receive widespread attention from the market. Many industry professionals also expressed to Xiao Bian that Myo was in bankruptcy and did not expect to bring huge amounts of money. So for this company, it's not easy to get $120 million in investment. The Myo wristband can recognize gestures. The principle is that the sensor on the armband can capture the bioelectrical changes generated by the user's arm muscles during exercise to determine the wearer's intentions, and then send the results of the computer processing to the receiver via Bluetooth. Control equipment.
In short, after wearing the Myo band, you can move and rotate the arm and make different gestures. These gestures can be used as a game or application input method. This is a great note, but the tracking accuracy of the first generation of products is not ideal. So although they are ready to use it as a VR input device, the market adoption rate is not high.
However, Xiao Bian learned that Thalmic Labs may be working on a more advanced input device. They are obviously taking virtual reality into account when designing. An anonymous source who claimed to be associated with former Thalmic Labs revealed that the company has employed VR and human-computer interaction talents, and their next-generation products are expected to be launched at the end of this year. From their updated official website and news feed, they can see that their recent investment includes VR products and other products including smart phones and computers (see the figure below).
The anonymous person also provided previously unpublished renderings (below), who said that the new device is also a wristband that can sense finer details of gestures and can seem to detect finger-based gestures. The core technology behind the new device is based on a patent that was filed by Thalmic Labs in June of last year and is entitled "Systems, articles, and methods for wearable human-electronics interface devices."
The content of the patent document is very large, but it obviously includes a picture of a wristband device with a built-in sensor. This device was originally referred to as "a typical wearable human-electronic interface device" that "bends the user's wrist wrapped" and "adjusts the size and area to serve the user's different appendages." However, for this patent, the core point is obviously the wrist.
The multiple sensors in the figure below are “spaced apart from each other so that they can be evenly distributed around the user's wrist.†Each sensor is equipped with a processing component (220) that can classify the received signals. In other words, the processing component can interpret the data and judge the input.
This device includes a transmitter (240) which, in simple terms, can send data to another device (computer/mobile phone, etc.) for use as input data.
The patent also emphasizes the type of input that the new device can detect. Patent documents repeatedly refer to "finger touch". In addition, different finger positions can generate different signal data, which are perceived and received by the wristband. This patent appears to indicate that device integration consists primarily of MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) microphones, which detect vibrations due to finger flexion.
The patent also mentions an integrated inertial sensor that captures the rotation and "broader movement" of the user's arm and wrist. This patent was submitted in June 2015 and was released in December 2015.
It should be pointed out that information about Thalmic Labs developing a new wristband controller comes from a source that has not been officially confirmed. However, considering that Thalmic Labs has obtained a huge investment, the timing of the news leaks and the above patent documents, we have reason to believe that the company is carrying out an important project.
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