March 2017

WaveTrace

WaveTrace is a tracking technique which allows you to interact with systems by mimicking the movement of its 'options' with your hand whilst wearing a smart watch. When activated, your Wi-Fi enabled smart watch will calculate if your wrist is moving similarly to any of the presented options, and if so, will activate that option. This allows you to interact with numerous devices and services without the use of optical sensors (i.e. cameras), or the need to remember any gesture whatsoever. After performance testing in a lab-based setting, four prototypes were created for four different scenarios to study its real-world usefulness for: smart home control, television control, classroom participation, and individual interaction with public displays.

Technology

The system builds upon a prototype built for SmoothMoves, and utilises an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) present into most smart watches. Wrist movement data is sent to a laptop, via a bluetooth connected smart phone, over Wi-Fi. The laptop calculates a correlation between this movement data, and if they match, controls the device showing the selected 'option'. A newer version of this prototype used an Android Wear 2.0 smartwatch, eliminating the need for a smart phone.

Contribution

As part of my Master Thesis, I fully developed the software for this specific interaction technique, and studied its performance. Similarly, I built upon this with four software prototypes and user studies and analysed the results. After my MSc, I developed this research prototype into a product family of three lights.