A new Huawei patent is pointing to a smartwatch coming from the company that has air gesture support, signaling that users would be able to interact with a watch without having to touch the display. The patent in question is labeled as “Gesture Input Method For Wearable Device” which paired with the images that were contained in the patent, which you can see below, indicates that Huawei has envisioned a new type of input method for the watch.
In one of the diagrams you can see the watch from the side and it displays a projected signal interface which looks to be for recognizing gestures that you would make with your fingers to initiate certain actions or functions on the watch. This interface looks like it would be projected over the backside of your hand and would allow for various gesture types to be made, such as drawing a letter over the interface for a designated action. For this to work, of course, you would need to configure the actions first, meaning you’d need to set up which gestures you would want to associate with each action.
This type of input method isn’t entirely new. Huawei as well as many other Chinese smartphone brands employ gestures for waking the display by drawing letters on the screen to launch actions or shortcuts to an app, the only difference is that those gestures are drawn directly on the display and here they would not be. In addition to drawing gestures over the projected interface, it also looks like the user would be able to activate the interface for bringing up gestures by moving the wrist up and down. One diagram even shows that the projected interfaces may have multiple segments, potentially up to four, allowing for up to four gestures input areas to be configured and used at any one time. Since this is a still a patent there’s no way to know if Huawei will actually use this input method for a watch. Huawei reportedly filed for this patent back in 2016, but WIPO’s publication date lists January 2, 2018, so in terms of being granted the approval for the patent it would seem that this is fairly new, making it possible that Huawei’s next smartwatch will utilize this input method.
