A gleaming Belle from Beauty and the Beast glided along the exhibition floor at last year’s San Diego Comic-Con adorned in a yellow corseted gown with cascading satin folds. She could barely take two steps before a cluster of little girls stopped her for photos. As she waved one hand, her other delicately held a red flower with mechanized fingers. The kids stared. It’s not every day you see a fairy-tale princess with a cybernetic hand. Disney meets Skynet. But this being the epicenter of the nerd universe, the mash-up slayed. “Oh, cooool,” one of them cooed.For Mandy Pursley, the 42-year-old graphic designer cosplaying Belle, it was a chance not only to show off her enviable sewing chops, but also to display the bleeding-edge technology that overhauled her life. Pursley was born with a right arm that ended just below her elbow. She began wearing prosthetics at age 6 but grew disillusioned with them a few years later. “I didn’t find it to be very functional or very useful,” she says.Over time, her left hand overcompensated. She accomplished tasks like typing 60 words per minute, but more nuanced dexterity eluded her. That is, until three years ago, when Pursley began using the Ability Hand, a state-of-the-art bionic prosthetic from San Diego startup Psyonic. Marketed as the first and fastest touch-sensing myoelectric hand, the device translates arm muscle movements from the residual limb into electronic signals that control the hand, while a haptic motor vibrates to indicate how tightly items are being grasped.The results were game-changing. Before, Pursley often held objects with her feet. Now she tackles mundane tasks like opening a water bottle or threading a needle much more conventionally. “I’m able to use jewelry pliers now when I’m doing my costume making,” she says. “Before I would put the pliers in my armpit. It would hurt, and I didn’t have a lot of control over the really fine motions, like opening and closing them.”Pursley wasn’t the only bionic cosplayer at Comic-Con. She was part of a posse of Psyonic clients alongside Aadeel Akhtar, the firm’s 38-year-old founder and CEO and Ability Hand inventor, coursing through the convention after their panel, “Psyonic: Bionic Arms in the Real World,” which returns to this year’s event on July 24.Graphic designer Mandy Pursley as Beauty and the Beast’s Belle [Photo: Susan Karlin]“It’s the world’s premier conference for sci-fi,” Akhtar says. “This is the current state of bionic technology, and what’s happening in science fiction is becoming a reality. We can demonstrate it at San Diego Comic-Con and show the world the cool stuff our users can do.”Their presence is a natural here, given the pervasiveness of high-tech prosthetics in the sci-fi and comic universes. Marvel’s Bucky Barnes and Mad Max’s Furiosa sport bionic arms, while characters in the anime series Fullmetal Alchemist boast a range of mechanized limbs (not to mention the robotic hand Luke Skywalker receives in Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back after Darth Vader severs his real one).But it wasn’t just sci-fi fans. The technology also caught the attention of science and film luminaries. Retired NASA astronaut Cady Coleman and Captain America: Brave New World production designer Ramsey Avery, at SDCC for panels, stopped to chat with Akhtar and examine the Ability Hand.Avery recalls being awestruck by the machinery: “After years of cheating fake versions of functional artificial arms to look real for film or theme parks, there it was, the real thing!” Avery is returning to Comic-Con this year to conduct portfolio reviews on July 26. “It is so exciting to find myself living in the aspirational versions of the sci-fi I read as a kid, instead of the dystopian ones,” he says.From left: Captain America: Brave New World production designer Ramsey Avery, Psyonic creative marketing manager and Grasping Beyond filmmaker Dale DiMassi, and retired NASA astronaut Cady Coleman at San Diego Comic-Con [Photo: Jeff Brannon]It’s the same “wow” factor that last year blew away the hard-won Shark Tank judges, three of whom—Lori Greiner, Daymond John, and Kevin O’Leary—agreed to invest a collective $1 million in exchange for a 6% equity stake, the particulars of which are still being negotiated. The device was also featured in a 2023 60 Minutes segment on University of Chicago prosthetic brain implant research.Having amassed $4.1 million from equity crowdfunding and now valued at $65 million, the 10-year-old company has grown to more than 45 employees and broken even with a projected revenue of $6 million this year. It’s now in the process of relocating to a nearby 22,000-square-foot manufacturing facility, almost five times the size of its current digs, and considering an eventual IPO to scale up manufacturing. Psyonic’s hands are used by nearly 250 patients and more than 50 of the world’s top robotics researchers, institutions, and companies, including NASA, Meta, Google, Mercedes-Benz, and MIT. Nonhuman