Brainwave and Virtual Touchscreen Controllers for Smartwatches

This article was originally published by Acculation on another site.

Need for new interfaces

With Moore’s law shrinking your desktop down to the size of your smartwatch or a future Google Glass knockoff, a lot of ingenuity is going to go into human interfaces that will allow wearables like smartwatches smartwatch and VR and augmented reality glasses (Google Glass) to run your favorite killer apps. We’ve already seen some of this with smartphones touch screens, multi-touch gestures, and, to a lesser extent, speech recognition largely replacing mice and traditional keyboards.

If we want to make the form factor even smaller, touch screens become more limiting. Google Glass (and some of its knockoffs) have a touch sensitive panel on one side for more complex inputs, but Glass is intended to be primarily controlled through gaze and voice recognition. A smartwatch doesn’t have the option of gaze recognition (unless it’s linked to Glass, which may turn out to be a commonplace arrangement), so, at least with current technologies, we’re back to (tiny) touchscreens and voice recognition.

Of course, it’s unlikely that Glass and smartwatches of the future will be limited by current technology. There are a number of ways to overcome the limitations of smartwatch touchscreen or clunky Glass touchpanel.

“Star Wars” input devices

One of the first things that comes to mind are better displays that can project beyond the small surface area of a watch (think a 3D display out of Star Wars). Here smartwatches would have an advantage over Glass, in that they could still have impressive visual capabilities without interfering with normal vision (useful if you’re out for a jog, or your car isn’t one of those newfangled self-driving models). We’d expect these advanced visual interfaces to also support input (the same way the current generation of touchscreens are both a display and an input device).

Some early hints of what such extended input devices might look like are already coming on the market. Haptix, which recently exceeded its rather modest goal of $100K on Kickstarer, makes a camera-like deivice that can turn regular surfaces into 3-D multi-touch controllers. (See this article in AllThingsD for more information on Haptix.) It’s easy to imagine a camera on a smartwatch allowing you to swipe and gesture in the area above (or below) the smartwatch to control the device, especially combined with some sort of 3D (or even 2D) projected display.

Brainwave controller

Another possibility involves brainwave input. This is especially well-suited for Glass knockoffs (since they are already mounted on the head, and could combine brainwave input with their existing combination of touchpanel, voice, and gaze detection). But one can imagine something along the lines of present-day bluetooth headsets also providing smartwatches with brainwave input for those times when the user doesn’t want to wear a full-fledged Glass-like device.)

One of several possibilities might involve brainwave input. (This might require wearing some small headgear, perhaps along the lines of present-day bluetooth headsets, but nothing that obstructs vision the way a Glass knockoff would. Of course, brainwave control would be a way of improving Google Glass as well.)

A number of companies are rushing to market various brainwave-controlled input devices. InteraXon, which just raised $6 Million, is planning to release Muse, a thought-controlled headband, in early 2014; see these articles in AllThingsD and BetaKit for more information.

The future

Smartwatches and Google Glass (and knockoffs) have an exciting future as the new computing form factors. We’re just beginning to imagine the types of new inputs these devices will support.