Myo’s Developer Alpha Teaser Compilation Video Showcases Gesture Control Potential

Waterloo’s Thalmic Labs is shipping out its Myo gesture control band alpha units to developers to get them building software compatible with the new hardware, and it’s already resulting in some incredibly impressive early demos. The Myo team compiled a few of those together into a single short teaser video, but it’s enough to spark the imagination and whet my appetite for when the Myo hardware finally ships to consumers.

You’ll see the robot controlled by Myo that we posted about before, created by Canadian robotics startup Clearpath, but also in-game control with the armband in a space combat sim, use of the accessory as a remote camera trigger, and an early example of integration between Thalmic’s interface device and Oculus VR’s Rift immersive gaming headset.

Myo has a lot of potential, but the Oculus Rift integration is potentially the most interesting piece of the puzzle, to both observers and investors. The gesture control armband does indeed look like a multifunction device with a lot of potential use cases, but that won’t sell it to everyday consumers. If Myo wants to avoid the fate of past devices like the Leap Motion Controller that got a lot of hype pre-release, but then seemed a bit aimless and without a real killer use case when it shipped.