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September 24, 2019 01:00 pm

Facebook Buys CTRL-Labs, Startup That Makes Neural- and Movement-Monitoring Armband

Facebook is buying CTRL-labs, a NY-based startup building an armband that translates movement and the wearer's neural impulses into digital input signals. TechCrunch reports: Bloomberg pegs the deal between $500 million and $1 billion. A source close to the matter tells TechCrunch the same. The acquisition, which has not yet closed, will bring the startup into the company's Facebook Reality Labs division. CTRL-labs' CEO and co-founder Thomas Reardon, a veteran technologist whose accolades include founding the team at Microsoft that built Internet Explorer, will be joining Facebook, while CTRL-labs' employees will have the option to do the same, we are told. Facebook has talked a lot about working on a non-invasive brain input device that can make things like text entry possible just by thinking. So far, most of the company's progress on that project appears to be taking the form of university research that they've funded. With this acquisition, the company appears to be working more closely with technology that could one day be productized. CTRL-labs' technology isn't focused on text-entry as much as it is muscle movement, and hand movements specifically. The startup's progress was most recently distilled in a developer kit that paired multiple types of sensors together to accurately determine the wearer's hand position. The wrist-worn device offered developers an alternative to camera-based or glove-based hand-tracking solutions. The company has previously talked about AR and VR input as a clear use case for the kit.

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