A Smart Watch Controlled by Twists, Tilts, and Clicks
A project at Carnegie Mellon University suggests a better way to control these new gadgets: allowing users to physically tilt, click, and twist the watch’s bezel, the area around the screen. This could make it much easier to do things like set up appointments, play music, or navigate a map on the tiny display.
“It’s not that these watches aren’t fast enough or even have enough battery life—it’s that we can’t get the input and output good enough,” says Chris Harrison, an assistant professor of human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University, who worked on the project with several colleagues.
The group built a prototype device and presented a paper detailing it at the recent ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Toronto.