Press
The wand types what you write in the air — first as a small handheld remote, the wandBox, then as a signet ring for smart glasses, the wandRing. This page holds what a journalist needs: releases, a fact sheet, images, boilerplate and a person to ring. Coverage will be listed here as it appears.
Press releases
New study of 52,191 letters written in the air finds a neural net reads the over-60s better than the under-25s
Men and women write the same in the air; older hands don't shake more, they slow down after 50; left-handers draw circles clockwise three times as often — from the largest air-writing dataset with the writers' age, sex and handedness attached
Fact sheet
- What it is: a device that types what you write in the air; handwriting is recognised from motion alone, on the device, and it connects as a standard Bluetooth keyboard — TVs, phones, computers, glasses, nothing to install. Two bodies on one engine: the wandBox, a handheld, goes first; the wandRing, a signet ring on the index finger for smart glasses, follows it. Today’s handheld has no camera and no microphone.
- Who: Input-A (legal name Inputa Inc., Delaware, incorporated 14 November 2025; engineering in Berlin). Three co-founders: John Usher — audio-DSP engineer, McGill PhD, ~20 years of edge DSP and edge AI (an upmixer credit that shipped inside Dolby Atmos; TWS-earphone signal processing; MPEG-I immersive-audio standards); Brian Firestone — commercial strategy; John Keady — intellectual property, an attorney who filed the company’s provisional applications.
- How it is measured: paid testers on Prolific, leave-one-subject-out; cold-start and personalised numbers are never merged. A first-time user’s words come out exactly right 85% of the time (317 writers); personalisation took the twelve writers the model found hardest from 82% to 93.5% (all twelve improved). Per-letter cold start ≈ 68% across left- and right-handers, women and men.
- Data: 490+ consented paid participants across 28 studies — 450 of them wrote in the air, across the 24 air-writing studies; the Air-Writing Atlas (52,191 letters, 349 people, ages 18–78) is the first public analysis of it.
- Where it goes: the TV first — the screen where typing is worst; then any screen without a keyboard, glasses included.
- Status (9 October 2026): six provisional patent families filed; five production-design wandBox boards assembled in September 2026, the first typing over Bluetooth, bench validation continuing; a 3D-printed test ring measured on one wearer, the ring’s own first boards due in November 2026. No product on sale yet.
- The name: “the wand” is the product; Input-A is the company. Not affiliated with Wand AI (wand.ai) or The Wand Company (UK).
Assets
- The Air-Writing Atlas: six charts (1600×1000 PNG) and a six-page carousel PDF —
/press/air-writing-atlas/cards/ - Site image (1200×630): https://the-wand.ai/og.png
- Photography of the hardware: on request.
Boilerplate
Input-A makes the wand, which lets you write on a screen by drawing letters in the air: first a small handheld remote, the wandBox, then a signet ring for smart glasses, the wandRing. Handwriting is recognised from motion alone, on the device — no camera — and the wand connects as a standard Bluetooth keyboard. The recognition model was trained on air-writing collected from paid, consenting participants. Founder John Usher is an audio-DSP engineer (McGill PhD; an upmixer credit that shipped inside Dolby Atmos; TWS-earphone signal processing). https://the-wand.ai
Contact
John Usher · john.usher@the-wand.ai · Berlin (CET) · interviews, data tables and chart source available on request.