Early in 2014, we first heard about the armband, Myo, that could be used as a motion control device for video game consoles, computers, and TVs. A year later Myo's creator, Thalmic Labs, put on a full demonstration of the armband at this year's CES, and it looks like Amazon is ready to start selling. Rather than just being able to turn things on and off, Myo uses sensors to track electrical impulses in the arm for performing subtle gestures. It is meant to not replace, but supplement a keyboard or mouse, especially when one is not near (such as the living room).

Thalmic Labs was founded by the University of Waterloo Mechatronics Engineering graduates Aaron Grant, Matthew Bailey, and Stephen Lake, who successfully raised over a million dollars in funding from seed accelerator, Y Combinator (Toms Hardware). Worn on the upper forearm, Myo detects nine axis of movement in the hand, wrist, and forearm. The result is very accurate representations of movements in a 3D environment. With Myo, users can play or pause a video by spreading their fingers, turn volume up or down by rotating their fist, and activate it to turn on by pressing the thumb and middle finger together.

The point of Myo is to be a quick alternative than using a mouse. While console games, such as Call of Duty, may require an ol' fashioned controller for those precisely-tuned movements, Myo could help “popularize casual PC games like the Wii popularized casual console games”, as stated by Toms Guide. Want a good hands-free game of Minecraft? Myo would be perfect for that. For the more extreme, there is potential to use Myo for connected home devices. The armband will be available for purchase on Amazon sometime in the first quarter of 2015, and should retail for $199. Interested parties, around 50,000 of them, have already placed their pre-orders back when Myo was in its early development stages.