In a paper in Nature, Meta detailed some of the sEMG wristband gestures you’ll use to control its HUD glasses & AR glasses.

The peer-reviewed paper, titled “A generic non-invasive neuromotor interface for human-computer interaction”, describes in scientific detail the device which Meta has been developing since at least 2019, when it acquired a startup called CTRL Labs.

CTRL Labs was co-founded and led by computational neuroscientist Thomas Reardon, who still leads the project at Meta today.

The wristband works by sensing the activation of the muscles in your wrist which drive your finger movements, a technique called surface electromyography (sEMG). It enables precise finger tracking with very little power draw, and without the need to be in view of a camera.

This means you can control virtual interfaces using subtle finger movements while your arm is at rest, instead of needing to raise your hands or speak out loud.

The video released alongside the paper shows four types of gestures:

• Writing individual characters on a surface using your index finger, which are converted to digital characters for text entry.
• Rotating your hand, using your wrist, to control a 1-dimensional cursor.
• Swiping your thumb against the side of your index finger.
• Tapping your thumb against your index finger, or holding, as a tap/click.

The paper also claims that Meta’s sEMG technology can now generalize to new users, without the need for a per-user trained model, and the company has released over 100 hours of sEMG recordings for use by the scientific community, which it says should help advance accessibility technology around the world.

The hardware shown in the paper is a research prototype, strongly resembling one first shown in 2021. But at Meta Connect 2024, the company publicly demoed a sleek seemingly-productized version of the wristband, codenamed Ceres, as the input device for the Orion AR glasses prototype.

Swiping your thumb against the side of your index finger was introduced as a Meta Quest SDK feature in March, called microgestures, and was a key part of the Orion demo.

Renders of Ceres, and footage of a similar-looking device in use, were discovered inside leaked early firmware for the simpler HUD glasses that The Verge, The Information, The Financial Times, and Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman have all previously reported that Meta intends to release later this year, codenamed Hypernova and seemingly named Meta Celeste.

Gurman has reported that Meta intends to include the wristband with Hypernova, with the total package priced “over $1000 and as high as $1300 to $1400”.

The leaked firmware included tutorial videos for some of the same gestures seen in the Nature paper, as well as others, including pinching your thumb to your index finger and “pulling” horizontally or vertically.

Meta Connect 2025 will take place from September 17, and we expect Meta to announce Celeste then and open preorders for shipping in October, assuming it doesn’t get delayed.

In April, Mark Gurman reported that some Meta employees were working weekends to ship the HUD glasses on time. In just under two months, we should know whether these efforts succeeded.