TrackballWatch: Trackball and Rotary Knob as a Non-Occluding Input Method for Smartwatches in Map Navigation Scenarios

Abstract

A common problem of touch-based smartwatch interaction is the occlusion of the display. Although some models provide solutions like the Apple “digital crown” or the Samsung rotatable bezel, these are limited to only one degree of freedom (DOF). Performing complex tasks like navigating on a map is still problematic as the additional input option helps to zoom, but touching the screen to pan the map is still required. In this work, we propose using a trackball as an additional input device that adds two DOFs to prevent the occlusion of the screen. We created several prototypes to find a suitable placement and evaluated them in a typical map navigation scenario. Our results show that the participants were significantly faster (15.7 %) with one of the trackball setups compared to touch input. The results also show that the idle times are significantly higher with touch input than with all trackball prototypes, presumably because users have to reorient themselves after panning with finger occlusion.