It's the only interface that isn't an adaptation of techniques used for bigger things

May 1, 2014 06:30 GMT  ·  By

Even now, smartwatches haven't really taken off as a market in their own right, despite the marketing attempts of Samsung, LG, Sony and everyone else with such an item on sale or on the way.

The main reason for this is that smartwatches haven't really found that all too important and unique feature that makes them feel like their own invention instead of a miniaturized smartphone.

As with many products, the way we interact with watches is a big part of the product image: are we wearing a patchwork gadget, or a truly new, useful and fun device?

A team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU for short) may have just provided that last, tiny piece that could make everything fall into place.

More precisely, they have created a new way to interact with smartwatches, one that can't truly be described by the word “interface.”

We say that because the watch doesn't actually ask that you touch the screen except to launch certain applications.

Most everything else is done by moving or otherwise touching or placing pressure on the screen itself, or the smartwatch as a whole.

Tilting the watch, twisting your wrist, clicking the whole watch face, rotating the watch itself, all of these actions have an interpretation.

Say you're navigating through Google Maps. On a monitor or even a smartphone, you have the space you need to swipe a finger and move around the map, but a watch display is too small to make that pleasant.

The CMU research team made it possible to navigate by tilting, twisting and clicking the watch, thus manipulating the user interface.

The proof-of-concept used a small, 1.5-inch screen and had the PCB visible, and wires sticking out of it, but that's okay. These things aren't supposed to look glamorous. They only need to work. Aesthetics are dealt with once the idea actually gets the green light for development.

And the new smartwatch interaction technology has very little chances of not being pushed forward, though it ultimately falls to mobile device and wearable gadget makers themselves to adopt the idea.

Maybe Samsung will use it in its next Gear watch, or Sony will exploit it in its efforts to cause some ripples of its own in this field. For a while anyhow, since it's not very likely for any one product maker to have monopoly over it for long. Sadly, we can't really speculate on the time frame of application.