the wand — blogNotes from the people making the wand: air-writing, the data behind it, and what we learn on the way. https://the-wand.ai/blog/2026-09-11T07:41:53Z John Usher Three problems. One thing in the hand.https://the-wand.ai/blog/three-problems/2026-09-11T09:00:00ZThe elderly are left out of the family chat; phone keyboards are too small for the hands that use them; and there is no good text interface for smart glasses. Three problems that turn out to be the same problem, and what a handheld that types what you draw in the air does about it. Plus nine things to take away, including the one that surprised us — the wand reads the over-sixties better than the under-25s. 450 paid volunteers have written in the air for our AI. Here is how well it reads a stranger — and how to teach it your own hand in five minutes.https://the-wand.ai/blog/teach-it-your-handwriting/2026-08-27T09:00:00ZSince May, 450 paid volunteers have written in the air for the wand across 24 studies. How well the recogniser reads a hand it has never seen — 85% of words exactly right, cold; by handedness, sex and age; half get 95%, the worst tenth 65% — what five minutes of your own writing changes (28 people, before and after, every number), where the data came from, what more data buys, and the five-minute version you can run on your own phone. Your bird-song app and the wand use the same trick. Here is what a neural network sees when you write in the air.https://the-wand.ai/blog/how-the-wand-reads/2026-08-21T09:00:00ZMerlin turns bird-song into a picture and reads it with a convolutional network; the wand reads the motion of your hand the same way. Watch real recordings from our study light up a bank of lamps, and see that a network that had never met the writer reads the over-40s better than the under-25s. Our neural net reads the over-60s better than the under-25shttps://the-wand.ai/blog/air-writing-atlas/2026-08-15T09:00:00ZWe paid 349 strangers to write 52,191 letters in the air to teach the wand to read air-writing. The recogniser reads left- and right-handers, women and men, and the over-60s equally — the 18-to-24s were the ones it struggled with. Plus: men and women write the same in the air, and older hands don't shake more, they slow down. Glasses everywhere, keyboards nowherehttps://the-wand.ai/blog/glasses-everywhere-keyboards-nowhere/2026-08-11T09:00:00ZIt's been quite a summer for face computers — and none of them has a keyboard. On the Glass years, the backlash that was really about the camera, and why the face computer still needs handwriting. Why we're building the wandhttps://the-wand.ai/blog/why-we-are-building-the-wand/2026-08-01T09:00:00ZThe idea came in lockdown, 2020: kids growing up staring at screens, elderly parents thumb-typing WhatsApp, and a camera in the living room never an option. What the wand is, why the TV comes first, and where it goes.