Doublepoint is the company behind an impressive Wear OS app that lets any Android smartwatch add hand pointing and gestures to XR headsets or glasses without needing optical hand tracking.
A quick demo offered by Doublepoint at the Augmented World Expo in Long Beach brought across the concept.
While Meta Quest headsets already let you point and pinch via the built-in optical hand tracking, Don Hopper was able to install WowMouse on his Quest 3 to demonstrate the technology.
He reports the pinch gesture supported by WowMouse worked well as a "click" across Quest 3, though sensitivity needed adjusting, and dragging objects with a pinch didn’t seem to work well.
Conceptually, WowMouse is also designed as a smart home universal remote. The demo at AWE showed control of two different lamps and I was asked to stand in a specific spot on the floor, gesturing to each light and taking control of the object with a pinch, then rotating my wrist to adjust brightness.
For future smart glasses and ultra-compact XR headsets, WowMouse could deliver many of the benefits of indirect hand tracking input without the power consumption or sensors the optical approach requires. And unlike optical hand tracking, a watch can deliver haptic feedback. I could see WowMouse's approach being one day integrated by Apple Watch for use with future Apple smart glasses, and in Wear OS by Google for use with Android Micro XR.
