Navigate and use Netflix to watch content through a Thalmic MYO device.

Brainstorm and Ideation

My team at DubHacks 2014 consisted of five people: Me, Erik Thornquist, Blaine Jeffries, Daniel Landram, and Lucas Ou-Yang. We really wanted to take advantage of the opportunity of having access to many different wearable devices like Leap Motion and the Oculus Rift. We wanted to play around with the Oculus but unfortunately, there were none left for my team. After many different conversations and brainstorm sessions, we decided to build something with the Thalmic MYO.

Here are a few random ideas we brainstormed with the MYO:

Initial Thoughts and Constraints

This was a new medium I was designing for. There were so many things I had to keep in mind when designing an experience for something like the MYO:

• First of all, are we creating an experience or enhancing one?
• The difference between MYO and Kinect is that it's portable
• How can we distinguish intentional gestures from unintentional ones?
• Who is this product for?
• We want to make something usable, not just gimmicky and cool
• One big constraint is that there is only a limited amount of gestures available right now

First we decided on creating a MYO controlled toy car for children. It turned out that this was not possible to complete with the experience the team had and the limited amount of time that was available at this hackathon. Then we decided to create an experience for using MYO to control Netflix browsing and watching for experienced Netflix users. Here are some of my notes on my design process for this:

Conclusion

Being the only designer on this, I was able to work closely with the engineers on my team and lead a lot of the decision making. Overall, it was so much fun to design for a medium I've never designed for. I'm really interested in continuing to learn more about gesture control! Here's a video of a demo of it: