Reality Labs new project: Facebook’s neural wristbands to let you control AR glasses

Facebook Reality Labs in its blog post yesterday stated its building an interface for augmented reality by developing natural ways to interact with its AR glasses.

The wrist-based device lets uses interact with devices via gestures by reading the signals off of neurons. The underlying technology is electromyography that uses sensors to translate electrical motor nerve signals—travelling from wrist to digital commands—to control the device functions. EMG in this case can understand finger motion of just a millimeter.

“What we’re trying to do with neural interfaces is to let you control the machine directly, using the output of the peripheral nervous system — specifically the nerves outside the brain that animate your hand and finger muscles,” stated Thomas Reardon, FRL Director of Neuromotor Interfaces in the blogpost. Reardon had joined the FRL team when Facebook acquired CTRL-labs in 2019.

Facebook also states that CTRL-labs team has made developments on personalized models that would reduce the time taken to train custom keyboard models to adapt to an individual’s typing speed and technique.

“The goal of neural interfaces is to upset this long history of human-computer interaction and start to make it so that humans now have more control over machines than they have over us,” Reardon explains in the post.

The wearables may not be a entire solution on its own but be assisted by intent prediction and user modeling adapting to the context in real time, states Hrvoje Benko, FRL Director of Research Science. For instance, artificial intelligence can help you predict the next task of the user. If you head for a jog, and based on previous behavior, the running playlist is presented on the display. The user has to confirm with a micro gesture.