Finnish startup Doublepoint launched its free app, WowMouse, for the Apple Watch this week at CES 2025. The app makes use of the wearable’s sensors, compass, and accelerometer to show your hand right into a mouse that may management gadgets by way of hand gestures.
The Apple Watch already makes use of the same expertise for the double faucet characteristic it launched in 2023. The watch detects micro-movements in your wrist while you faucet your thumb and index finger collectively, and registers it as a click on in your gadget.
Doublepoint does this too – extra precisely than Apple, it claims – nevertheless it additionally goes a step additional. WowMouse lets you level your hand at your Mac and management the cursor in your laptop’s display utilizing a companion app. The startup plans to increase to Bluetooth enabled gadgets as nicely, permitting you to manage good lights with a degree.
The chief expertise officer of Doublepoint, Jamin Hu, put an Apple Watch on my proper hand and requested me to level at a flooring lamp throughout the room. I did, and the lamp began to glow. I tapped my thumb and index finger collectively, and the sunshine turned off, however after I rotated my palm in the direction of the ceiling, the sunshine grew brighter.
I’d normally need to take out my telephone, open an app, and flick on the good lights in my home one after the other. However with Doublepoint’s app, I may management my good dwelling gadgets with the wave of a hand. Hu notes there shall be an preliminary setup section to point out the app the place the lights are in your home. However after that, WowMouse will be capable to inform what gadgets you’re pointing at.
The magic behind Doublepoint’s expertise comes all the way down to a deep neural community skilled on a really massive, customized dataset of hand gestures. Everybody’s finger faucet and hand gestures look a little bit bit completely different, however this huge dataset permits Doublepoint’s underlying mannequin to know the person’s intent.
100,000 folks have already downloaded the WowMouse app on the Google Play Retailer, which Doublepoint launched atlast yr’s CES. On Sunday, the corporate expanded onto Apple’s App Retailer and has already picked up a number of thousand customers.
Large tech corporations and {hardware} startups are constructing good glasses that use voice as an interface, however these gadgets nonetheless want some sort of handheld part. The Orion AR glasses that Meta demoed in September use an EKG wristband that lets customers scroll and click on buttons whereas sporting the good glasses.
Doublepoint CEO Ohto Pentikäinen says this expertise may work with good glasses in the same method, however utilizing the sensors that exist already inside standard watches.
Based in 2019, Doublepoint initially made its personal {hardware}. Just a few years in the past, the corporate pivoted to creating software program that works with good watch giants, such because the Apple, Google, Fitbit, and Whoop. To this point, Doublepoint has raised $6.5 million, partly from the federal government of Finland, and it expects to shut one other funding spherical in 2025.
In the end, Doublepoint wish to license its expertise to good watch makers. Whereas its WowMouse app has garnered a devoted following, creating an interface expertise in another person’s closed ecosystem could be limiting.
For instance, if you wish to use WowMouse to manage your laptop and your TV, you’d need to disconnect WowMouse from one gadget and reconnect it to a different. After making an attempt out WowMouse, you may think about how seamless Doublepoint’s expertise could be if it wasn’t working in another person’s walled backyard.
