Look at the device sitting in your palm, on your lap or desk, or even on your wrist. Amazing that those are places to look for the latest technologies and some of the most powerful and compact technologies end up, isn’t it? And technology continues to advance ‘ex machina’ (from within the machine) that is the industry itself, and Android looks to see the brunt of this new technology thanks to a new interaction method by a company called Deus Ex Technology that plans to pass the gauntlet of interaction to your gauntlet.
Meet Aria, a motion-based interaction device for your Android Wear or Pebble Time smartwatch of choice. This company, much like Thalmic Labs with their Myo armband, has a new method of interacting with your wrist-borne device by tracking the movements of the tendons in your wrist, translating them to a paired gesture or action on the watch.
This tendon-tracking technology will, according to the company’s site and TechCrunch, appear in Pebble’s upcoming smartwatch, the Pebble Time as a module that can attach to the watch’s band and make use of the module’s technology to allow finger-free, gesture-based navigation and use of the smartwatch. This module will also be compatible, since it uses Bluetooth to connect to the watch, with current, and likely future, Android Wear watches. And this new gesture based interaction will pair nicely with Android Wear 5.1‘s new gesture controls, with its wrist flicks, to allow your screen to stay fingerprint-free.
This add-on will reportedly cost about $170 on its own, to be used with the Android Wear of your choice, as well as integrated into a watch band made specifically for the upcoming Pebble Time which will set you back $70, which is a fair deal for what the band allows.
Once this band and device become widely available, you might see fellow Wear owners not just flicking their wrists up and down, but also clicking, sliding, and drawing apart their fingertips to slide up and down a menu, change settings, and generally do anything that typically takes a tap or five. This will definitely allow people to feel their way into the future, as long as they don’t mind perhaps getting a sidelong glance in public.