For the uninitiated, Oculus Rift is a next-gen virtual reality headset equipped with a variety of accelerometers and other tech, allowing it to track your head movement and change your field of view as you look around. It’s been widely hailed as the future of gaming as we know it. But until recently, users were still confined to the joysticks and buttons of traditional controllers when it came time to execute actions. That’s where Myo comes in.
Myo is a new type of gesture control device designed to be worn on your arm. Instead of relying on cameras and complex gesture-recognition algorithms to detect hand movements, the device uses accelerometers and a process called electromyography to read the muscles in your forearm. The result is ultra-accurate gesture control that works anywhere and doesn’t require cameras, so it wont falter under varying light conditions or distances.
When you combine these two devices, you get the video below. The demo game that they’re playing isn’t particularly polished, but even with chunky animation you can still get a good idea of how accurately the player’s in-game movements mimic what they’re doing in real life.
Oculus and Myo are still only available to a limited community of developers. However, both devices are expected to be available to the public before the end of the year, so it’s not unreasonable to think that you and I could be playing games like this by 2015.
