Imagine if you could turn up the volume on your speakers, dim the room lights, play console games, switch presentation slides and fly drone, all with the help of your hand movements. With the new gesture control watch from Indian start-up Hug Innovations, you can do just that, and a lot more. Hug innovations is an Indian technology start-up which showcased its Gesture Control enabled smartwatch at The Future Unleashed Conference hosted by Microsoft in Mumbai last week. The Hug smartwatch is the brain child of Founder & CEO, Raj Neravati, who has more than 17 years of experience in the IT industry. The company has roots in the city of Hyderabad, while the headquarters are now based out of the US. Working towards providing cutomers a touch free experience while interacting with devices, the Hug smartwatch team gave us a complete low-down of how the device functions and the array of features it will offer.
Before I tell you more about how the Hug smartwatch differentiates itself from others, let's first get its specs out of the way. The watch uses a High Resolution 9 axis IMU (3Axis Accelerometer-3AxisGyroscope-3Axis Magnetometer) and a Low Resolution 3 Axis Accelerometer which helps the watch's gesture control capabilities. The watch houses a 1.6-inch, 240×240 pixels, always on Transflective LCD display protected by Asahi Dragontrail Glass. It runs on the Nucleus RTOS operating system and a Mediatek 2502 C processor. The Hug watch is compatible with Android, iOS devices and uses standard Bluetooth 4.0 connection to pair with devices. It comes with 2GB built-in storage and 128MB RAM.
The Hug Smartwatch variants
According to the company, this whole package is powered by a 360mAh battery which lasts about 1.5 – 2 days on use and 5 days on standby. "In virtual reality environments, right now you have a joystick. You are inside a virtual environment but you still have a video-game like experience. But, now if you use your hands, you can shoot people, zoom in and zoom out, change directions, it's the next level." says an enthusiastic employee giving demos of the Hug Smartwatch booth at the Microsoft event. He went on to explain that the company has plans to expose their SDK to developers who can integrate their gesture control technology to any Blutooth ecosystem, be it a robotic arm, a traffic signal, etc. "We are the first smartwatch in the world to integrate with the Oculus Rift," said the spokesperson.
Gesture control on the Hug smartwatch
Along with its gesture control capabilities, the Hug smartwatch also allows users to make calls, send text messages, navigate maps, play music and find devices wirelessly. The watch also has a buil-in heart-rate monitor along with a couple of cool security features. "For India, personal safety plays a huge role, so how we differentiate in the personal safety angle is that we have an SOS button on the watch, all people have to do is press it and contacts will be notified with a tiny URL through which the person can be tracked in real time," said Neravati. This panic button is also coupled with a gesture based security feature which can also interpret a hand gesture as sign of trouble for situations discretion is neccessary. The gesture-based safety is always on and can also detect if the user faints and falls or has a vehicular accident. Hug Innovations is one of the many start-ups that use Microsoft's Azure platform to build their businesses.
Azure is a flexible, enterprise grade cloud computing platform which Microsoft provides and the platform is free for the first year of usage. Describing the platform, Neravati said, "Microsoft Azure program is really a boon for start-ups because we are able to play around with Azure without it costing a dime. The Microsoft team has truly worked with us as a partner. Now we have a hybrid cloud built using Azure…Microsoft's data privacy stands out the highest. Data centers in India give a lot of security and confidence on geographic parameters to consumers." Simply put, this means that the data generated by the Indian Hug Smartwatch user will be locally stored in the 3 Microsoft data centers located in India.
The Hug smartwatch will be available for purchase through Flipkart soon and will be the first of its kind wearable coming from an Indian start-up. Its success or faliure though, depends on the ability of developers to integrate numerous Bluetooth ecosystems with the watch, to maximise its potential in the field of gesture control.