What you need to know
- Doublepoint showed off the WowMouse app at CES 2024, which turns your Wear OS smartwatch into a mouse.
- Open-air gestures can be used for navigation and a light pinch is used to select or scroll.
- Unfortunately, the app doesn’t work on the first or second-generation Google Pixel Watch.
Out of the many cool concepts shown off at CES 2024, most of those prototypes and demos won’t ever make it to market. If you’re looking to try one of CES 2024’s coolest demos from wherever you are, we’ve found a great one. It’s called WowMouse, and it’s an app that turns your Wear OS smartwatch into a Bluetooth mouse.
The app is available for download now, and it just received a big update this week that lined up with CES. Essentially, WowMouse uses the existing sensors in your Wear OS smartwatch to turn it into a spatial mouse. You don’t need any surface to use it since just moving your arm in the open air will move your cursor. When you want to click, swipe, or drag, just lightly pinch the hand on the same arm as your smartwatch.
Though it might sound gimmicky, WowMouse looked pretty reliable and usable in hands-on demos. Quinn Nelson of Snazzy Labs posted a hands-on video to X, which you should check out below:
Found this booth, @doublepointlab at #CES that turns your WearOS watch into a Bluetooth mouse. All off-the-shelf hardware. It works shockingly well and they’re targeting licensing to OEMs so the app is free for end-users. Worth playing around with! pic.twitter.com/KPv9Xn9g4oJanuary 11, 2024
The app is developed by Doublepoint, which says it will enable your Wear OS watch to work as a mouse with any Bluetooth device. However, you will need certain Wear OS smartwatches to take advantage of WowMouse. First and second-generation Pixel Watch models are not supported as of now, and Doublepoint says that the app was tested most on Samsung’s Wear OS watches, such as the Galaxy Watch 6.
The pinch gesture used by WowMouse resembles the new Double Tap gesture included on Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 smartwatches. However, Double Tap only controls the smartwatch itself and not any external devices. That makes WowMouse a much more versatile solution, and by all accounts, so far, the app is better at picking up gestures than Double Tap.
There are all sorts of situations where using a Wear OS smartwatch as a mouse would make sense. The first one that comes to mind is when presenting, as you can control a computer while moving around during a speech or presentation. Using something like WowMouse could be simpler and better than using a dedicated Bluetooth slideshow remote.
We’re curious to see how Wear OS smartwatch users put WowMouse to use and when support might end up on the Pixel Watch.
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