SMART WATCHFACE: FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
What is the main contribution of this work?
This is a simple yet "clever" idea. We see our central contribution as bringing a new input idea to light for researchers and practitioners to consider in this emerging and important domain. Smartwatches are clearly very capable computers with terrible input mechanisms – we believe this work helps to advance that domain.
Would rotating the watchface while viewing it induce nausea or vertigo-like sickness?
When you are manipulating the watchface yourself, your visual and motor systems work in tandem, and the effect is minimal.
Why not use touchscreens? They seem fine.
Smartwatch screens are tiny, and they suffer from the fat-finger problem. Our approach takes nothing away from current interactions, instead, only brings extra capability to the table. See the video above, which illustrates the potential of our novel approach: - namely an occlusion free, multi-degree of freedom input method. This offers the highest input expressivity of any smartwatch on the market (circa 2014), and we believe it will stimulate future interest in this area.