WatchThru expands smartwatches into 3D through a transparent display. This enables novel interactions that leverage and extend smartwatch glanceability.

WatchThru: Expanding Smartwatch Displays with Mid-air Visuals and Wrist-worn Augmented Reality Dirk Wenig, Johannes Schöning, Alex Olwal, Mathias Oben and Rainer Malaka

We introduce WatchThru, an interactive method for extended wrist-worn display on commercially-available smartwatches. To address the limited visual and interaction space, WatchThru expands the device into 3D through a transparent display. This enables novel interactions that leverage and extend smartwatch glanceability. We describe three novel interaction techniques, Pop-up Visuals, Second Perspective and Peek-through, and discuss how they can complement interaction on current devices. We also describe two types of prototypes that helped us to explore standalone interactions, as well as, proof-of-concept AR interfaces using our platform.

Dirk Wenig, Johannes Schöning, Alex Olwal, Mathias Oben and Rainer Malaka (2017) WatchThru: Expanding Smartwatch Displays with Mid-air Visuals and Wrist-worn Augmented Reality In CHI '17: Proceedings of the 35th Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 716-721. ACM, New York, NY, USA. 10.1145/3025453.3025852 | PDF of Paper | BibTex