Not too long ago, a team of engineers from Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute developed a new smartwatch prototype with hopes of making wearable device usability much less cumbersome.
The watch itself features layers of sensors and circuit boards, and can respond to more types of interaction than your ordinary wearable with a touchscreen and accelerometer. This prototype is capable of detecting and reacting to specific gestures, from pans and twists to tilts and clicks. For example, you can twist to zoom in on a map, pan between daily events on a calendar, and even play a game of Doom without ever touching the screen. Or, when running a music app, you can pan through main menus, twist to adjust volume, and click to play or pause a song.
“Each sensor provides 8-bit X and Y position data, as well as click state, 200 times per second. This data is sent via USB to a host computer, where a Java program processes the inputs and implements an interactive application. The graphical output of this application is sent to the smartwatch display,” the team writes. “A more advanced prototype could include additional input dimensions. For example, instead of joystick sensors with binary click, pressure sensors could be used. This would allow for analog tilt sensing. With four such sensors, 2D analog tilt is possible – yielding a device with pitch, yaw and roll, in addition to 2D positional tracking.”
Keep in mind that, although this design offers a multi-degree-of-freedom interface, it isn’t looking to abolish touchscreens altogether. It’s simply looking to provide a more user-friendly experience for wearers. Intrigued? You can see the prototype from 2014 in action below, read all about it in the team’s published paper, or check out the project’s recent write-up in Digital Trends.
[Images: Gierad Laput / Human-Computer Interaction Institute]