Watchconnect: a toolkit for prototyping smartwatch-centric cross-device applications

S. Houben, N. Marquardt

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapterAcademicpeer-review

72 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

People increasingly use smartwatches in tandem with other devices such as smartphones, laptops or tablets. This allows for novel cross-device applications that use the watch as both input device and output display. However, despite the in-creasing availability of smartwatches, prototyping cross-device watch-centric applications remains a challenging task. Developers are limited in the applications they can explore as available toolkits provide only limited access to different types of input sensors for cross-device interactions. To address this problem, we introduce WatchConnect, a toolkit for rapidly prototyping cross-device applications and interaction techniques with smartwatches. The toolkit provides developers with (i) an extendable hardware platform that emulates a smartwatch, (ii) a UIframework that integrates with an existing UI builder, and (iii) a rich set of input and output events using a range of built-in sensor mappings. We demonstrate the versatility and design space of the toolkit with five interaction techniques and applications.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationCHI '15 Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
PublisherACM/IEEE
Pages1247-1256
Number of pages10
ISBN (Print)9781450331456
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 18 Apr 2015

Publication series

NameConference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings
PublisherACM

Keywords

  • Cross-device interaction
  • Gestural interaction
  • Interface design
  • Rapid pro-totyping
  • Smartwatch
  • Toolkit

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