Humane is a company that has been effectively running in stealth mode for some time now, but it just broke cover in the best possible way. It’s been working on something that we can best describe as a Star Trek combadge but with a projector built in. And it’s even more awesome than that already sounds.
The company, which was founded by ex-Apple employees Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, showed the device off at a TED Talk and while the video of that talk isn’t set to be made public until 22 April, some outlets managed to get their hands on some clips ahead of time. Those clips found their way onto Twitter and this thing looks mightily impressive.
We live in the future and this proves it
Inverse was one of the outlets that get their hands on some footage with Ray Wong sharing some clips on his Twitter account. What we see is some kind of hands-free badge that can project information onto the wearer’s hand when needed. But there are no screens and no physical methods of input. It really is the Star Trek communicator, and then some.
While making calls is an obvious use case for the device, we’re told that it will also have a catchup feature that will provide a summary of things that the wearer might have missed. There is also a translation feature that can respond to things using an AI-created approximation of the wearer’s voice as well. Remember, there are no displays or keyboards here, everything’s done via voice commands.
While much of this is possible via phones and apps, what makes the Humane product so fascinating is the fact that it’s all done without any of those things. The badge isn’t connected to a phone at all, making it all the more impressive.
We’ll hopefully get a better feel for what this product is, how it works, and what it is capable of when the full TED Talk is made available online. Until then we’re left wondering a couple of key things – how much will this thing cost, and when can we buy it?
