WatchOut

Abstract

Current interactions on a smartwatch are generally limited to a tiny touchscreen, physical buttons or knobs, and speech. We present WatchOut, a suite of interaction techniques that includes three families of tap and swipe gestures which extend input modalities to the watch's case, bezel, and band. We describe the implementation of a user-independent gesture recognition pipeline based on data from the watch's embedded inertial sensors. In a study with 12 participants using both a round- and square-screen watch, the average gesture classification accuracies ranged from 88.7% to 99.4%. We demonstrate applications of this richer interaction capability, and discuss the strengths, limitations, and future potential for this work.