Admittedly, Apple iWatch users have had it since October last year, but as of today at Mobile World Congress, the Doublepoint startup has launched the updated version of its popular WowMouse gesture-touch control app for Android smartwatches.
Launched at CES in January, the free app now supports Google’s Pixel Watch 2, having already garnered around 30,000 downloads by Samsung Galaxy users since CES, according to the company.
As with the iWatch gestures, the WowMouse app creates a sort of “wrist-based” mouse, using taps fed via Bluetooth to the watch to allow users to control headsets, phones, tablets, computers and other devices.
On his stand at the Four Years From Now section of MWC, founder Ohto Pentikäinen told me: “Gestures are a big theme nowadays, with Apple Vision Pro coming out. We see people doing these pinches all over the streets nowadays! And what we do is we make that kind of invisible. We do these gesture detection algorithms just very discreetly so you can do it in your pocket, just like that.”
He told me the vibration that occurs when your fingers touch each other trigger the app: “The impact travels through the tendons all the way to the wrist. And we pick it up with the inertial measurement unit — just a gyroscope.”
For AR AND VR the WowMouse could also be a boon for gaming and other kinds of interactive apps on AR/VR headsets.
For developers, Doublepoint is offering preorders for its Evaluation Kit, which includes a wristband, algorithms and evaluation tools so that developers can test Doublepoint gesture detection algorithm.
