Smartwatch-based Pointing Interaction

Abstract

In this work, we present the design and evaluation of a smartwatch-based mid-air pointing and clicking interaction technique called Twist, Point, and Tap, or short TPT. Incorporating only commodity devices, we aim to provide a fast and error-prone pointing approach that can easily be deployed to existing environments with a shared display, e.g., meeting rooms or public info points. Detected by internal sensors, TPT maps horizontal forearm movements as well as wrist rotation to relative cursor movements on a nearby large display. Left and right-click interactions are supported through tapping on the smartwatch’s touchscreen. By running a Fitts’s law study, we compared our TPT concept against an existing smartwatch-based pointing technique called Watchpoint (Katsuragawa et al., 2016). The study revealed that the TPT concept has a significantly smaller error rate while maintaining a comparable performance.