Show HN: Kinesis – Control your Mac with the Meta Neural Band
https://github.com/callbacked/kinesis
a couple hours ago i had astra take on a 10 month old repo of mine https://github.com/callbacked/neural-band-poc/that involved finding a way to use the meta neural band independently from the glasses to read the sEMG data off of it. i really think it is a cool piece of technology that largely gets overlooked by the glasses, and always thought it was a shame it couldn't be used outside of its main application.after making quick work of that, i wanted to use it to control my mac using gesture controls and that's how kinesis was born. it has been very cool being able to swipe from desktops using my fingers, swiping up to open up mission control or controlling a virtual knob to adjust my volume.
i definitely havent scratched the surface with the neural band but it has been a really fun endeavor thus far! i really hope others can find creative uses for their neural bands too :)
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Are they patented to heck and back or can another manufacturer make a EMG bracelet for controlling a PC?
https://mudra-band.com/products/mudra-link
Do you think it's likely someone goes looking for the real-time data processing platform, lands on this GitHub and gets confused?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discoverability
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine
Not sure about you, but if I'm trying to find a tool, I don't search just "Houdini", but I'm also an adult who can put two terms together. I linked the above page in hopes that it might help you more efficiently use search engines in the future just like me.
No, but I do think it is likely that someone might find this while looking for the kinesis keyboard, a popular product which has been on the market for 34 years.
Facebook was already a word.
Meta was already a word.
You're right. They would have been much more successful if they had chosen "something unique and specific".
In this specific case though as others pointed out there are already a lot of products on that specific segment with that name.
No level of convenience will tip that scale.
I might accept a Meta paperclip into my house, but then again, why risk it ;)
Meta's game is to do all sorts of dirty tricks to pull you into its data. No thanks.
The existence of a used market also slightly increases the value of new things. By buying used, you’re supporting/signaling the used market and indirectly supporting the company.
If you don’t want to support a company, don’t go near their products.
Your criticism of buying used is complete nonsense. Secondary markets have put companies out of business. You’re not “signaling” anything except that the price is too high.
I've been moving more and more away from terminal and IDEs, and I've been exploring how I could move to a flip phone / table + compact keyboard as most of my development time is now possible to be done via just using TTS.
I'd be interested in exploring if something like this could remove the need for a mouse or touching the screen as well.
Some alternatives that are not bound to the meta glasses: Mudra Link (USD 299), Mudra Band for Apple Watch (USD 350), MindRove Armband (USD 800, wow), SiFi Labs SiFi Band (no price), OYMotion gForce Pro+ (USD 1250, ok this side project is starting to look expensive)
I worked a bit with Tap Strap on XR and without but in my experience once you master a keyboard nothing comes close while manipulating text, e.g code.
I was under the impression the set is pretty limited and maybe not completely robust (like per person setup/calibration etc.)
I spend a LOT of time with different interfaces (eye tracking, 6DoF controllers, pens, touchpad in keyboard, ergonomic mouse, etc) and... basically if there is 1 thing I'm confident about is that input methods are very task dependent. If you want to input text, especially hard to pronounce keywords and symbols, keyboard is great, if you want to move a pointer at arbitrary position in 3D keyboard sucks. It also depends on the context, behind a desk vs on the move is totally different.
So yes quite curious about such a wide statement.
I switched recently from mouse to touchpad and ... next day my great ergonomic mouse was basically in a drawer. Meanwhile when I tried to use Tap Strap the first step was to learn combinations with basically no gradient of feedback, it was either success or failure.
Inertia isn't such a big problem if the investment is small but if you have to learn an entirely new way then it's a huge risk.
Anyone have any long-term hands-on experience with it? Would love to know if it feels clunky or not...
Could I suggest that you shoot a new promotional demo video with enough lighting that viewers can see your hands? Personally I'd be very curious to see and understand the actual gestures that support a real world workflow involving multiple desktops and applications, with the hands transitioning as needed between neural band mode for navigation vs. keyboard/mouse mode for fine-grained motor inputs.
> In another prototype—again, heavy on the use of what he called "materials that move at the speed of thought," such as coat hangers, tape, fishing line, projectors, chopsticks, and a presentation clicker—they learned that the Minority Report style of interfacing with a computer by swiping with your hands at images was actually a poor idea. While people loved trying out the prototype, even the strongest found that their arms and shoulders soon began to hurt.
FWIW it's very to test by the way, pick a random XR demo support hand tracking and you will see it's not that tiring. It doesn't mean it's useful though.
I remember when OCZ NIA came out and it claimed BCI and it was effectively doing muscle activity too.
At least meta is properly representing what it does!
Have you considered providing GadgetBridge support? I don't see anything on https://codeberg.org/Freeyourgadget/Gadgetbridge/issues?stat... but it could bring interesting combinatorial possibilities.
For anybody who wants to try that without any extra hardware but just your webcam give a go to https://codepen.io/mediapipe/pen/bGweWyR based on MediaPipe Hands in JavaScript https://chuoling.github.io/mediapipe/solutions/hands.html
You can bind a hand position or gesture (e.g. going from one position to another) to a desktop command by running this in the background on your NodeJS companion app and spawn() for the commands.
FWIW did something similar using OpenCV https://fabien.benetou.fr/Portfolio/PostureMaintenance 15 years go.
If you also are interested in gaze tracking https://lebmatter.github.io/gazerjs/ is another Web based example.