Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg suggested that his company is making progress on the first "consumer neural interfaces," or non-invasive wearable devices that can interpret brain signals to control computers.
"One of the things I'm very excited about - I think we're going to start making consumer neural interfaces available soon. I think it's going to be pretty wild."
However, unlike Elon Musk's Neuralink brain chip, Zuckerberg explained that these devices will not be something that "plugs into the brain," but something that can be worn on the wrist and that can "read the neural signals that the brain sends through the nerves to the hand to basically move it in different subtle ways.
Meta first began discussing the development of "wrist-based interaction" in March 2021 as part of Facebook Reality Labs Research.
Meta's wristband uses electromyography (EMG) to interpret brain signals for desired hand gestures and translate them into commands that control devices.
"Essentially, we are able to read these signals and use them to control glasses or other computing devices," he added.
The latest comments came during an April 18 interview between Facebook co-founder and technology entrepreneur and YouTuber Roberto Nickson.
"We're still at the beginning of the journey, because we haven't implemented the first version of the product yet, but the internal fun of it is... really cool... really interesting."
Earlier this year, Meta's CEO said that this neural wristband could become a consumer product in just a few years, using artificial intelligence to overcome the limitations of camera-based gesture tracking.
He has also designed neural interfaces to work with Ray-Ban smart glasses using augmented reality from Meta.
Commenting on the company's smart glasses, he said that the "hero function" is to integrate artificial intelligence into them. "We're already very close to multimodal artificial intelligence [...], so it's not enough to ask a question via text or voice; you can ask it about everything that's going on around you, and it can see what's going on and answer questions [...] that are pretty crazy," he added.
