A company called Doublepoint announced a new app during CES this week called WowMouse that turns Android smartwatches like the Samsung Galaxy Watch into a gesture-based mouse for your computer. This means waving your arm to move the mouse and squeezing your fingers to click (similar to the double-click feature on the Apple Watch Series 9). The application is now available on Google Play Store.
WowMouse works by casting the watch as a Bluetooth Human Interface Device (HID) mouse, allowing it to work with a variety of operating systems, once paired as you would any other Bluetooth mouse. According to Doublepoint, this includes Windows, Linux, macOS, and iPadOS. It’s been confirmed to work on some Wear OS watches, like the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4, 5, and 6, but the company says tap detection is inconsistent on the Pixel Watch. Apple Watches don’t support Bluetooth HID, so Doublepoint wrote that it couldn’t create an app for watchOS.
You can easily see that this works well – video game consoles have done a great job of motion control like this for years. And it sure looks like it did in a short video from Snazzy Labs on Thursday.
The company has bigger ambitions, though: The ad encourages manufacturers and developers to license its software to do things like dim a smart light by rotating your wrist, as seen in this CNET video:
It’s a very fun futuristic trick and I totally support it! But it’s hard to see anyone investing their resources into supporting an app that only works on a small portion of the smartwatch market.