Wednesday, 19 June, 2024 UTC
Summary
Doublepoint is the company behind an impressive Wear OS app that lets any Android smartwatch add hand pointing and gestures to XR headsets or glasses without needing optical hand tracking.
A quick demo offered by Doublepoint at the Augmented World Expo in Long Beach brought across the concept.
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While Meta Quest headsets already let you point and pinch via the built-in optical hand tracking, Don Hopper was able to install WowMouse on his Quest 3 to demonstrate the technology.
He reports the pinch gesture supported by WowMouse worked well as a "click" across Quest 3, though sensitivity needed adjusting, and dragging objects with a pinch didn’t seem to work well.
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Conceptually, WowMouse is also designed as a smart home universal remote. The demo at AWE showed control of two different lamps and I was asked to stand in a specific spot on the floor, gesturing to each light and taking control of the object with a pinch, then rotating my wrist to adjust brightness.
For future smart glasses and ultra-compact XR headsets, WowMouse could deliver many of the benefits of indirect hand tracking input without the power consumption or sensors the optical approach requires. And unlike optical hand tracking, a watch can deliver haptic feedback. I could see WowMouse's approach being one day integrated by Apple Watch for use with future Apple smart glasses, and in Wear OS by Google for use with Android Micro XR.