Ring x2: Designing Gestures for Smart Rings using Temporal Calculus

Gheran, Bogdan-Florin [University of Suceava] Vatavu, Radu-Daniel [University of Suceava] Vanderdonckt, Jean [UCL]

We introduce "Ring×2," a design space for gesture input with two smart rings. Wearing two rings at once opens new input opportunities, unexplored by the community so far, such as bimanual ring gestures or shifting input from one smart ring to the other to effectively manage situational impairments, such as encumbrance. To enable such developments and explorations, we present a formal description of designing two-ring gestures from the perspective of temporal calculus, a logic-based framework for reasoning about events and actions occurring in time, which we exemplify on a dataset of 83 bimanual gestures performed by 24 participants with two rings. We hope that our exploration of two-ring gestures and our design approach rooted in temporal calculus will be provocative and inspiring for the community, leading to new designs of input techniques for smart rings.