Guiding gaze gestures on smartwatches: Introducing fireworks

Smartwatches enable interaction anytime and anywhere, with both digital and augmented physical objects. However, situations with busy hands can prevent user inputs. To address this limitation, we propose Fireworks, an innovative hands-free alternative that empowers smartwatch users to trigger commands effortlessly through intuitive gaze gestures by providing post-activation guidance. Fireworks allows command activation by guiding users to follow targets moving from the screen center to the edge, mimicking real life fireworks. We present the experimental design and evaluation of two Fireworks instances. The first design employs temporal parallelization, displaying few dynamic targets during microinteractions (e.g., snoozing a notification while cooking). The second design sequentially displays targets to support more commands (e.g., 20 commands), ideal for various scenarios other than microinteractions (e.g., turn on lights in a smart home). Results show that Fireworks’ single straight gestures enable faster and more accurate command selection compared to state-of-the-art baselines, namely Orbits and Stroke. Additionally, participants expressed a clear preference for Fireworks’ original visual guidance.