highlighted during the Connect 2022, the neural wristbands will of course serve primarily for accessibility purposes, if only to allow people with disabilities to take advantage of digital technology. But Mark Zuckerberg is intent on going way beyond that, predicting that said wristbands will overtake keyboards by 2028.
When Meta was still called Facebook (2019), he had acquired a start-up called CTRL-Labs who was working on a wrist-worn device that reads electrical activity directed at our hand. To operate, theEMG (electromyography) uses sensors attached to the circumference of the arm. The data is interpreted in real time by a computer which translates the physical movements of the equipped person into the application or game in question.
The engineers of CTRL-Labs remain confident that the Neural Wristband will be as life-changing as the keyboard layout has been QWERTY (19th century) or even the invention of the graphical interface at the end of the last century.
They want to combine this technology with that of RA glasses and think they have already found good concepts. Going back to the bracelet, its adoption should be much more practical than all the existing accessibility solutions. Indeed, voice input is limited to what the voice assistant knows how to answer. Also, sputtering or having to make the effort to clarify your thoughts before speaking is counter-intuitive. Same observation for the able-bodied who, for example, will have to hide to ask for sensitive information about their state of health. As for traditional controllers, you have to carry them everywhere with you, constituting for many a technological obstacle to be surpassed.
The idea of the bracelet is that it could to wear as gracefully as a watch. The wearer would thus be able to communicate and navigate much faster than with a mouse and keyboard, or with your fingers. Although we find it hard to imagine, if applications follow, the neural bracelet should truly revolutionize and turn the world upside down.
Mark Zuckerberg took advantage of the post-conference to state the following:
The main advantage of the neural bracelet is above all its responsiveness. If you want to start typing on your phone, you have to go through this whole process of taking your phone out, unlocking it… and then you can start. And on that, it will be extremely fast, because the bracelet authenticates you straight away!
However and for the moment, we have not yet succeeded in having a speed as fast as someone who is used to typing daily and quickly on the keyboard, but we are working on it.
To the Connect 2022CEO of Meta showed us, by wearing the bracelet, that tiny gestures often imperceptible to our eyes were enough to translate simple actions. And by that, we mean moving around a menu, switching between apps, and so on.
He further asserted that the form-factor of the bracelet was going to decrease considerably in the future. But it’s not just that that risks being reduced if we believe the boss of Meta. It seems like some R&D departments will be deprecated when others will be prioritized :
We’re really going to focus on wristbands and probably depreciate other things in Reality Labs. There is obviously an interaction between each of our solutions, but I also think that each of them will be sufficient on its own.
Until we have neural interfaces, there will always be many more people using phones and computers than VR/AR devices. And this, even if they were initially invented to be a kind of gateway to immersive worlds.
While this is all somewhat engaging, we can’t say that the flagship apps of the metaverse experience a sufficient retention rate from the community for the technology to become sufficiently democratized. If even the developers ofHorizon Worlds walk backwards when it comes to using it (see article), we are still a long way from full-scale use.
This is what concerns Meta over all : Firstly, the attention paid by gamers to applications related to metaverse and, secondly, the time they devote to it. In other words, attention and neuroscience experts are driving social applications at Metawhich would partly explain the lack of artistic ambition ofHorizon Worlds.
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