Aria for smartwatches brings gesture controls to your wrist-worn wearables

The latest update to Android Wear does bring some gesture controls to the fledgling wearable operating system, but some clever fellows have made their own system which is compatible with not only Android Wear devices, but Pebbles as well, and uses only hand gestures. Aria for smartwatches uses a clip-on accessory that sits inside your watch band and monitors your hand movements and interprets them as gesture controls - I’m assuming there are some smarts in the device that track your muscle contractions and map these to movements like tapping your fingers together and flicking. Check out their video to see it in action:

It kind of looks a bit unwieldy at first, but when you think about it, it’s so much more intuitive to navigate a static user interface using subtle movements than need to activate the gyro like the latest Android Wear update requires you to. If this is your cup of tea, you’ll be happy to know that Aria will be starting a Kickstarter campaign on June 1st to fund its development – the bad news is that you will need to shell out $169 to get the Android Wear version (since its the developer version), but a much more reasonable $69 for the Pebble Time version. To keep an eye on news about Aria, you can subscribe for updates here.

What do you think about Aria for smartwatches? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

Source: Aria via engadget