Andrew Bosworth, vice president of VR (Virtual Reality) and AR (Augmented Reality) of Facebook, recently announced that the company acquired CTRL-labs, a startup that will join the Facebook Reality Labs team to create a prototype wristband capable of transmitting electrical signals from the brain to the computer’s entrance.
CTRL-Labs was founded in 2015 by neuroscientists Thomas Reardon (creator of Internet Explorer) and Patrick Kaifosh. In April they had announced their CTRL-kit which is based on a technology known as electromyography (EMG), used in medical diagnosis to assess the health of the muscles and nerve cells that control them.
Bosworth argues that the kit will be critical to developing new ways of interacting with machines: “a technology like this has the potential to open up new creative possibilities and reimagine 19th-century inventions in a 21st century world.” It further explains how it works: neurons in the spinal cord send electrical signals to the muscles to make certain movements, and the wristband will be able to decode those signals and translate them into a digital signal for a device to I can understand it.
This way they hope that people can control their devices in a more natural, intuitive and non-invasive way. In this note:
