A Kickstarter campaign has begun for the CenWatch, a wearable device on your wrist which enables users to control the screen through mid-air gestures, supporting handwriting,multi-finger typing, taps, and swipes.
The CenWatch recognises handwriting, and allows users to draw lines, doodle, and even write without touching the screen.
It also recognises multi-finger typing, and allows users to type on a keyboard 'in the air'.
The Kickstarter page says; "One of the bottlenecks of AR glasses is the lack of a good interactive entrance, which is why no matter what powerful features AR glasses have, their usage rate is always low. Using CenWatch as the interactive entrance for AR glasses, users can control the glasses by swiping their fingers in the air.
"AR glasses have always been unable to find a balance point in terms of volume, weight, and battery life. The fundamental reason for this is the requirement for computing power. CenWatch itself is equipped with advanced mobile phone chips, which can serve as a source of computing power for AR glasses, effectively reducing their volume and weight while significantly improving their battery life."
CenWatch can perform all the operations of touchscreen, including handwriting, multi-finger typing, clicking, swiping, etc. but also achieve spatial operations like VR controllers because it can accurately track the three-dimensional coordinates of fingers in the real world.
Lidar is the core component of CenWatch, which can accurately capture the three-dimensional spatial position of fingers (the fingertip relative to the wrist) with an accuracy of up to 1mm. Then use the 9DoF IMU sensor to obtain the movement of the wrist relative to the body. Finally, the spatial motion of the fingers relative to the body is obtained through fusion algorithms. Based on the spatial position of the fingertips mentioned above, a virtual touch plane is set up in front of the person to interpret finger and hand movements into operational commands.
CenWatch is equipped with the MT6789 chip, which is a 6nm process mobile phone chip with 8 cores, including two ultra-large cores (Cortex-A76, up to 2.2GHz) and six large cores (Cortex-A55, up to 2.2GHz).