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Future watch: Gestures on the Samsung Gear 2
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Why walk over to turn up the music volume or turn off lights when you can take care of all that with a flick of the wrist? At the Tizen Developer Conference in San Francisco, a Samsung development team out of Madrid demonstrated how software can turn the Samsung Gear 2 into a wrist-worn remote.
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To use the music demo, I turned on the remote control, an app, then tapped the screen and moved my arm right to play a song or advance the track, left to stop, up to raise the volume, and down to lower it.
Each unspoken command requires you to press the screen, move your arm, and then return to the initial position, a deliberate act that keeps you from accidentally changing controls every time you reach for something on the top shelf.
In an interactive gaming demo called Evil Fish, you follow the movements of a pissed-off piranha as it lunges toward you. Successfully raising your arm north, south, east, or west punches your underwater adversary in its fishy face.
Is tapping to open an app and then waving your arm around more convenient than pressing a plus or minus sign on the smartwatch screen? Of course not. But that isn’t really the point.
Keep in mind that these software exercises are essentially proofs of concept to show developers what’s possible. Beyond creating its own apps, it’s other people’s software sparks that will make Samsung’s smartwatch gestures useful in the real world.
What do you think — are smartwatch gestures something you’d get behind? Shout it out in the comments below.
