Leveraging Smartwatch and Earbuds Gesture Capture to Support Wearable Interaction

Abstract

Due to the proliferation of smart wearables, it is now the case that designers can explore novel ways that devices can be used in combination by end-users. In this paper, we explore the gestural input enabled by the combination of smart earbuds coupled with a proximal smartwatch. We identify a consensus set of gestures and a taxonomy of the types of gestures participants create through an elicitation study. In a follow-on study conducted on Amazon's Mechanical Turk, we explore the social acceptability of gestures enabled by watch+earbud gesture capture. While elicited gestures continue to be simple, discrete, in-context actions, we find that elicited input is frequently abstract, varies in size and duration, and is split almost equally between on-body, proximal, and more distant actions. Together, our results provide guidelines for on-body, near-ear, and in-air input using earbuds and a smartwatch to support gesture capture.