Uiwear: Easily Adapting User Interfaces For Wearable Devices

Wearable devices such as smartwatches offer exciting new opportunities for users to interact with their applications. However, the current wearable programming model requires the developer to write a custom companion app for each wearable form factor; the companion app extends the smartphone display onto the wearable, relays user interactions from the wearable to the phone, and updates the wearable display as needed. The development effort required to write a companion app is significant and will not scale to an increasing diversity of form factors. This paper argues for a different programming model for wearable devices. The developer writes an application for the smartphone, but only specifies a UI design for the wearable. Our UIWear system abstracts a logical model of the smartphone GUI, re-tailors the GUI for the wearable device based on the specified UI design, and compiles it into a companion app that we call the UICompanion app. We implemented UIWear on Android smartphones, AndroidWear smartwatches, and Sony SmartEyeGlasses. We evaluate 20 developer-written companion apps from the AndroidWear category on Google Play against the UIWear-created UlCompanion apps. The lines-of-code required for the developer to specify the UI design in UIWear is an order-of magnitude smaller compared to the companion app lines-of-code. Further, in most cases, the UlCompanion app performed comparably or better than the corresponding companion app both in terms of qualitative metrics, including latency and energy, and quantitative metrics, including look-and-feel.