WowMouse turns your smartwatch into a gesture-based Bluetooth mouse

Doublepoint’s app lets you move your arm around to control your mouse and tap your fingers to connect.

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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. That means waving your arm around to move the mouse and pinching your fingers to click (similar to the Double Tap feature on the Apple Watch Series 9). The app is available now on the Google Play store.

WowMouse works by broadcasting the watch as a Bluetooth Human Interface Devices (HID) mouse, allowing it to work with a variety of operating systems, by just pairing it like you would any other Bluetooth mouse. According to Doublepoint’s site, that includes Windows, Linux, macOS, and iPadOS. It’s confirmed that it works on certain 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 writes that it can’t make an app for watchOS.

You can easily see this working well — video game controllers have done a great job with motion control like this for years. And it certainly looks like it does in a brief Snazzy Labs video from Thursday.

The company has bigger ambitions, though: The announcement pitches manufacturers and developers on licensing its software for doing things like dimming a smart light by rotating your wrist, like in this CNET video:

That’s a super fun, futuristic trick and I’m all for it! But it’s hard to see anyone investing resources in supporting an app that only works on a sliver of the smartwatch market.