Let’s just admit it, smartwatches are not that cool. At least not yet. Despite everyone—Samsung, Apple, even WIRED—wishing otherwise, the truth remains: Someday smartwatches might be great, but today is not that day.

You could blame the product’s false start on any number of reasons, but perhaps the biggest source of pain for smartwatch makers’ is embarrassingly human: Your chubby fingers. Today smartwatches are basically a dumber, smaller version of your smartphone.

Like all of our screen-based devices, they rely on multi-touch interaction; zooming, pinching, tapping and swiping to make things happen on screen. This works fine on a tablet or 5-inch display, but on a screen the size of an iPod Nano that continues to shrink? Not so much. “It’s a really limited and frustrating user experience,” says Chris Harrison, a professor in the Future Interfaces Group at Carnegie Mellon University. Harrison along with Carnegie Mellon PhD students Gierad Laput and Robert Xiao, have designed a new smartwatch conceptthat they hope will unlock the real potential of our increasingly tiny devices.

At a recent conference, the team presented a prototype of a smartwatch that’s controlled by tilting, twisting or clicking the bezel of the watch. Think of it like a mini joystick that can be used in conjunction with a touchscreen. It’s a radical departure from the pinches and swipes we’ve grown accustomed to, and Harrison believes it could be a step forward in making smartwatches, or small gadgets in general, actually do the stuff we want them to do.

>Smartwatches seem particularly positioned for interaction disruption.

A New Interaction Language

That’s really the problem, isn’t it? Today there’s little a smartwatch does that your phone doesn’t already do better. “Right now the killer app is your smartphone buzzes when you get a text, and you look at your watch and it says your friend just posted on twitter,” says Harrison. “I think the killer app for smartwatches is still somewhat elusive.”

And for good reason. There’s a serious bottleneck when it comes to user experience on small devices. People aren't enthralled with smartwatches because they don't have interesting utility, and the watches don't have interesting utility because the interactions designed into them don't allow for it. “The space of interactive possibilities with mobile devices is woefully under-explored,” explains Xiao, a third year doctoral student. “Small devices are a challenge that we’ve never had to deal with in the past.”

It's due time for a change in interaction vocabulary, the guys say. Throughout the past decade as our gadgets got smaller and smaller, we kept repurposing the same input that worked on screens ten times the size. It’s a legacy thing; touch screens have been so successful (and remain so) that it’s easy to employ the whole if it ain’t broke don’t fix it mantra. Problem is, when it comes to smartwatches, touchscreens are sorta broke.

Smartwatches have all sorts of constraints, namely size, that make using seemingly simple apps nearly impossible. “There’s not a good way to use a map application on smartwatches right now,” says Laput, a first year doctoral student. “Pinching and zooming is hard to do.”

With the Carnegie Mellon prototype, you can pan left and right to explore a map, use a twisting motion to zoom in and depress the face to access more information like store hours or reviews. Similarly, an alarm clock app shows the user twisting the bezel to scroll to a preferred time, while a rudimentary music app allows you to flip through artists with a panning motion, adjust the volume by twisting and play/pause by clicking. “That packs a lot of functionality into your fingertips,” says Harrison.

Perhaps the most telling demo app on the team’s smartwatch is a first-person shooter game that allows players to turn left and right by twisting and shoot by clicking. Trivial as it may be, it’s a rudimentary glimpse of what a standalone smartwatch app might look like. “The most important thing is being able to demonstrate that smartwatches can be used as a proper interactive device in their own right,” says Xiao.

Yeah but what about...

The prototype is a pretty rough proof of concept, but it’s proof nonetheless. The 1.5 inch screen looks like it’s barely hanging on to its electronic components, and Harrison admits that the watch would need some serious industrial design improvements to make it usable. ”Ours would fall apart in one day if you wore it out in the real world,” he says.

Image: Chris Harrison

In its current form, the smartwatch’s extra sensors make it bulky and prone to damage. There’s a reason that most gadget manufacturers have shifted to solid body construction. “Anything that moves has wear,” Harrison says. “And that’s definitely less attractive from an engineering perspective.” Getting this same functionality into a small, robust smartwatch would require sensors that detect force without using mechanical spring-like components.

>Sensors that detect pressure on a molecular level already exist.

Sensors like strain gauges, which detect pressure on a molecular level, already exist, it’s just a matter of incorporating them into a user-friendly design. “Right now, it would be a really tough sell because they’d increase the cost and size and battery consumption,” says Harrison. “But in five years? Who knows.”

Which leads us to the real question. How likely are we to see this sort of interaction in future smartwatches? If you look at the great circle of technology life, the best guess is, not for a while. Commercial success often has a decades-long lag after the technological breakthrough idea is introduced. Harrison points out that both Apple and Microsoft had tablet failures in the '90s, and even though multi-touch was first explored in the '70s, it wasn’t until Steve Jobs took a massive risk with the first iPhone that every other gadget maker realized the type of interaction was the wave of the future. Genius is always obvious in hindsight.

Changing behaviors in an existing platform is tough, which is why smartwatches seem particularly positioned for interaction disruption. Much to certain companies' chagrin, most of us have yet to spend any real time learning how to use the things. For what it's worth, Harrison isn't even sure the world is ready for the smartwatch—at least not in its current form. “It may be that smartwatches and Google Glass go into hibernation mode for 10, 15 years,” he says . “And then they come out, and there’s pent up demand and the apps are just right and boom, it’s a huge success.”