Snap buys brain-computer interface startup for future AR glasses

NextMind

Meta, Apple, and a bunch of other tech companies are building augmented reality glasses with displays that place computing on the world around you. The idea is that one day this type of product will be useful in a similar way to how phones changed the way we communicate. How do you control smart glasses with a screen you can't see?

It's a big problem the industry has yet to solve, but there's a growing consensus that a brain-computer interface will be the answer. NextMind is a Paris-based startup that makes a headband that lets the wearer control aspects of a computer, like aiming a gun in a video game. NextMind's technology will eventually be incorporated into future versions of Spectacles.

The $400 headband developer kit was introduced two years ago. The company's 20 employees will remain in France and work for the hardware group responsible for Spectacles, a forthcoming camera drone, and other gadgets. The company refused to say how much it paid for NextMind. According to PitchBook, the startup has raised about $4.5 million in funding and was last valued at $13 million.

The acquisition of NextMind is the latest in a string of deals related to augmented reality. It bought another display tech company in January.

There is more than one big tech player interested in brain- computer interface. Neuralink is a device that implants a device in the human brain and is ready for clinical trials. The brain interface project called OpenBCI is being worked on by Valve. Before its rebrand to Meta, Facebook catalyzed wider interest in the space with its roughly $1 billion acquisition of CTRL-Labs, a startup developing an armband that measures electrical activity in muscles and translate that into intent for controlling computers.

NextMind

The approach called electromyography is different from NextMind. NextMind uses sensors on the head to measure activity in the brain with the aid of machine learning.

Sid Kouider, founder and CEO of NextMind, explained in a 2020 interview with VentureBeat that they use your top-down attention as a controller. When you focalize toward something, you generate an intention of doing so. We don't decode the intention per se, but we decode the output of it.

The company wasn't committed to a single approach with its purchase of NextMind, but it was more of a long-term research bet. If you still have questions about NextMind, you can watch a video of the idea being unveiled in 2019.