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No touching! Aria lets you control your smartwatch without touching the screen

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Like most great ideas, the Aria was born from wanting to find the most elegant solution to a simple problem: How to use a smartwatch without a free hand. The Aria wearable clip is a “gesture controller for wearable devices” — in other words, it allows you to control your smartwatch without touching it.

Consider that when you are using your smartphone, you can control it with the hand that it’s held in. Your smartwatch, however, requires your other hand to be free in order to manipulate the interface and use it. The Aria seeks to solve that by giving gesture control to the hand wearing the watch.

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Functioning as a clip that’s attached to the strap of your smartwatch, the Aria senses a number of finger gestures and movements that allow wearers to interact with their smartwatches in a whole new way. As an Aria team member pointed out to TechCrunch in this video, if you are brushing your teeth or drinking a cup of coffee, it would be nice to have access to your smartwatch.

We see Alfredo from Aria wearing a smart watch with the device clipped on. He proceeds to roll his thumb and index finger much like you would on the Apple Watch dial, but in the air instead of on the device. As intended, we see the menu on the watch scroll through options, and by tapping his fingers together, Alfredo has selected one of them.

Aria: Control your smartwatch like never before

Pebble Time (the cheaper model) and Android Wear. The more expensive of the two will be aimed at developers, with the hope that the SDK will draw developers to expand the Aria universe working with Android Wear. Aria won’t likely be controlling the Apple Watch any time soon, but it will still give Android Wear fans plenty to look forward to.

Andre Revilla
Andre Revilla
AV Contributor
Andre Revilla is an entrepreneur and writer based in Chicago that has been covering and working in the consumer tech space…
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