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Controlling Devices With Gestures: MYO Raises $14 Million

This article is more than 10 years old.

Three school pals versed in mechatronics are adopting a different philosophy to controlling devices with hand gestures and they just received $14.5 million to build it into a business. Thalmic Labs, their company, is poised to unveil its motion sensor product to the world  and has already received 30,000 pre-orders from interested parties.

Motion sensors offer users of electronics a new way to control the devices that play an ever more important part in everyday life. Microsoft ’s Xbox is saddled with its Kinect feature, Nintendo ’s Wii found an eager audience, Leap Motion has its 3D motion sensing device and even Samsung’s newest smartphone – the Galaxy S4 – has Air Gesture, which lets users control various features with the swipe of a hand.

 Where Thalmic Labs takes a different route is in how it senses a user’s movements. The MYO armband, when worn on the forearm, picks up on not only the motion of the hand but senses the electrical activity in the muscles unique to a given hand movement.

Founders Aaron Grant, Matthew Bailey and Stephen Lake formulated the idea while working towards their degrees in mechatronics engineering at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Bailey and Lake had worked on another wearable technology project that helped the blind navigate in public by detecting obstacles. “The technology itself isn’t related but it got us really interested in this idea of how we could more closely connect technology with us as humans and blur that line between them—kind of give us enhanced abilities or super powers using technology,” Lake said in an interview with FORBES.

The fact that Thalmic’s MYO armband needs to be worn to operate gadgets may be a deal-breaker for those that champion motion-sensor systems, but Lake and Co. see obvious flaws with the alternatives. “Our feeling was that voice control is not a high fidelity enough input method,” he said. “It’s awkward too, socially. If you’re on the subway talking to yourself, you’re that crazy guy in the corner.”

As far as camera-based motion sensors are concerned, obvious shortcomings become apparent when not used in optimal conditions. “When you have vision based, you have to make a couple of trade-offs,” says Lake. “One is you want a large working area. So Microsoft Kinect has got waving your arms in the air in a big room but only gets these really course motions. Then you have the opposite where you have this really small area and have fine control.” MYO offers both.

There’s also the limitations that being tethered to the visual sensor brings. “The cameras, as simple as it sounds, have to be able to see your hands,” says Lake. “The minute you have something blocking the view of the camera you lose that recognition or tracking.” The work that the computer has to do to power those motion-based devices may not be enough to crash a laptop or desktop but it will suck the juice out of a mobile device, he added.

For the founders, hands – humanity’s most perfect extension of the brain – was the answer. “Why aren’t we using our hands and fingers to interact with everything?” said Lake. “Throughout our daily lives, that’s what we use.”

In a demo of the MYO armband, Lake shows how moving his fingers creates electric activity that the armband senses. Motion sensors in the band also detect when he turns his arm this way or that. He plays a basic section of the game Counterstrike to demonstrate how pointing his hand like a gun can move the crosshairs and with a flick of his thumb can fire.

Lake, Grant and Bailey began developing their idea in 2012, barely a week after their last class at Waterloo, in office space provided by the university. Two months later they demo’d the product by conducting a multi-media presentation using the band.

Thalmic is not rushing to declare exactly how the MYO device will be used, hoping that developers and companies will be creative and adapt it to any number of applications. In one niche, the company has been approached by a number of government and security agencies. Thalmic’s 20 engineers have also, Lake said, just begun playing with the virtual reality headset, Oculus Rift, and are experimenting with ways to use it in tandem with MYO.

Initial funding for Thalmic came through credit card debt and $25,000 from Waterloo University’s VeloCity Venture funding program. Following that the young company picked up national grants and, in December of 2012, Thalmic Labs raised a little over C$1.1 million from angel investors, including Lee Lau (ATI founder), David Ossip (founder of Workbrain and Dayforce) and Dan Debow. It’s recent $14.5 million A-round comes from Spark Capital and Intel Capital.

The company has been taking pre-orders at $149 apiece (30,000 since February) and is still selling them. The MYO armbands and corresponding software should be shipping in early 2014.

At the moment, Thalmic Labs is organizing its production line, choosing manufacturers from among a handful of tier one consumer electronics builders and spreading the word about their take on solving the gesture control problem.