Developer Builds Kinesis to Control a Mac With Meta's Neural Band

In the post, the developer, writing under the GitHub handle "callbacked," said "astra" had taken on a 10-month-old repository of theirs, neural-band-poc, whose purpose was to find a way to use the Meta Neural Band independently from the glasses in order to read the sEMG data off it. The developer described that work as quick, and said the gesture-control project followed from it.

Kinesis maps finger movements to Mac actions. The developer wrote that they can swipe between desktops using their fingers, swipe up to open Mission Control, and control a virtual knob to adjust the volume. No other gestures, supported applications or system requirements were described in the post.

The developer said the Neural Band itself is a piece of technology they consider cool and largely overlooked in favor of the glasses, and that they had long thought it a shame it could not be used outside its main application. "I definitely haven't scratched the surface with the neural band but it has been a really fun endeavor thus far!" the developer wrote, adding that they hoped others would find creative uses for their own bands.

The post includes a caveat about testing. "I really hope this works on other bands because the sample size has just been me so far," the developer wrote, indicating that the approach has been tried on one band and one user only. The post does not say how Kinesis is distributed, which Neural Band models it works with, or whether the tool will be released publicly. Only the neural-band-poc repository is cited as prior work.

Meta did not comment in the thread, and the post does not describe any involvement by the company in the project. At the time of writing, the Hacker News thread carried 37 points and 10 comments.