LAUSR

Due to the proliferation of smart wearables, it is now the case that designers can explore novel ways that devices can be used in combination by end-users. In this paper, we explore the gestural input enabled by the combination of smart earbuds coupled with a proximal smartwatch. We identify a consensus set of gestures and a taxonomy of the types of gestures participants create through an elicitation study. In a follow-on study conducted on Amazon's Mechanical Turk, we explore the social acceptability of gestures enabled by watch+earbud gesture capture. While elicited gestures continue to be simple, discrete, in-context actions, we find that elicited input is frequently abstract, varies in size and duration, and is split almost equally between on-body, proximal, and more distant actions. Together, our results provide guidelines for on-body, near-ear, and in-air input using earbuds and a smartwatch to support gesture capture.