Finnish startup Doublepoint launched its free app, WowMouse, for the Apple Watch this week at CES 2025. The app uses the wearable’s sensors, compass, and accelerometer to turn your hand into a mouse that can control devices through hand gestures.
The Apple Watch already uses a similar technology for the double tap feature it released in 2023. The watch detects micro-movements in your wrist when you tap your thumb and index finger together, and registers it as a click on your device.
Doublepoint does this too – more accurately than Apple, it claims – but it also goes a step further. WowMouse allows you to point your hand at your Mac and control the cursor on your computer’s screen using a companion app. The startup plans to expand to Bluetooth enabled devices as well, allowing you to control smart lights with a point.
The chief technology officer of Doublepoint, Jamin Hu, put an Apple Watch on my right hand and asked me to point at a floor lamp across the room. I did, and the lamp started to glow. I tapped my thumb and index finger together, and the light turned off, but when I rotated my palm towards the ceiling, the light grew brighter.
I’d usually have to take out my phone, open an app, and flick on the smart lights in my house one by one. But with Doublepoint’s app, I could control my smart home devices with the wave of a hand. Hu notes there will be an initial setup phase to show the app where the lights are in your house. But after that, WowMouse will be able to tell what devices you’re pointing at.
The magic behind Doublepoint’s technology comes down to a deep neural network trained on a very large, custom dataset of hand gestures. Everyone’s finger tap and hand gestures look a little bit different, but this large dataset allows Doublepoint’s underlying model to understand the user’s intent.
100,000 people have already downloaded the WowMouse app on the Google Play Store, which Doublepoint launched atlast year’s CES. On Sunday, the company expanded onto Apple’s App Store and has already picked up a few thousand users.
Big tech companies and hardware startups are building smart glasses that use voice as an interface, but these devices still need some kind of handheld component. The Orion AR glasses that Meta demoed in September use an EKG wristband that lets users scroll and click buttons while wearing the smart glasses.
Doublepoint CEO Ohto Pentikäinen says this technology could work with smart glasses in a similar way, but using the sensors that already exist inside popular watches.
Founded in 2019, Doublepoint initially made its own hardware. A few years ago, the company pivoted to making software that works with smart watch giants, such as the Apple, Google, Fitbit, and Whoop. So far, Doublepoint has raised $6.5 million, partly from the government of Finland, and it expects to close another funding round in 2025.
Ultimately, Doublepoint would like to license its technology to smart watch makers. While its WowMouse app has garnered a dedicated following, creating an interface technology in someone else’s closed ecosystem can be limiting.
For example, if you want to use WowMouse to control your computer and your TV, you’d have to disconnect WowMouse from one device and reconnect it to another. After trying out WowMouse, you can imagine how seamless Doublepoint’s technology would be if it wasn’t operating in someone else’s walled garden.
