Mobile By Matthew Humphries Apr. 30, 2014 8:30 am
It has taken several generations of touchscreen smartphones to get the interface right, and designers are still tweaking how we interact with our handsets with every new device and OS version. The same interaction problems face the forthcoming influx of smartwatches, only it’s actually more difficult to solve them.
That difficulty comes from the very limited size of the watch face, combined with the fact you can only use one hand because it is attached to a wrist. Ultimately, though, users are still going to expect to be able to complete many of the tasks they currently perform on their phone, but tweaked for smartwatches.
So how do you handle smartwatch input? Carnegie Mellon PhD student Gierad Laput believes he has a solution that involves not just interacting with the tiny touchscreen, but the whole watch as a 3D object you can tilt, twist, click, and pan (and eventually 3D pan, yaw, pitch, and roll, too).
Teaming up with fellow students Robert Xiao and Chris Harrison, they produced a prototype and video you see below to demonstrate how such an interface would work.
The six degrees of freedom mechanical input clearly makes the smartwatch a much easier device to interact with in different ways, and in turn it opens up the potential for functionality. Importantly, you never need more than two fingers to achieve all inputs. It’s so diverse, it even allows for the control of classic FPS Doom.
It seems likely smartwatch designers have been thinking about the smartwatch interface issue for some time now and experimenting. However, I have not seen a solution as complete as this one before.
The only questions that remain for me are: how small can they make this interface, and what will its impact be on battery life? If it’s small enough and low power enough not to impede current watch designs, expect someone to snap this tech up quickly for a commercial product.
More...
It has taken several generations of touchscreen smartphones to get the interface right, and designers are still tweaking how we interact with our handsets with every new device and OS version. The same interaction problems face the forthcoming influx of smartwatches, only it’s actually more difficult to solve them.That difficulty comes from the very limited size of the watch face, combined with the fact you can only use one hand because it is attached to a wrist. Ultimately, though, users are still going to expect to be able to complete many of the tasks they currently perform on their phone, but tweaked for smartwatches.
So how do you handle smartwatch input? Carnegie Mellon PhD student Gierad Laput believes he has a solution that involves not just interacting with the tiny touchscreen, but the whole watch as a 3D object you can tilt, twist, click, and pan (and eventually 3D pan, yaw, pitch, and roll, too).
Teaming up with fellow students Robert Xiao and Chris Harrison, they produced a prototype and video you see below to demonstrate how such an interface would work.
The six degrees of freedom mechanical input clearly makes the smartwatch a much easier device to interact with in different ways, and in turn it opens up the potential for functionality. Importantly, you never need more than two fingers to achieve all inputs. It’s so diverse, it even allows for the control of classic FPS Doom.
It seems likely smartwatch designers have been thinking about the smartwatch interface issue for some time now and experimenting. However, I have not seen a solution as complete as this one before.
The only questions that remain for me are: how small can they make this interface, and what will its impact be on battery life? If it’s small enough and low power enough not to impede current watch designs, expect someone to snap this tech up quickly for a commercial product.
- [h=4]Smartwatch interface[/h]
- [h=4]Smartwatch interface[/h]
- [h=4]Smartwatch interface[/h]
- [h=4]Smartwatch interface[/h]
- [h=4]Smartwatch interface[/h]
- [h=4]Smartwatch interface[/h]
- [h=4]Smartwatch interface[/h]
- [h=4]Smartwatch interface[/h]
- [h=4]Smartwatch interface[/h]
- [h=4]Smartwatch interface[/h]
More...
