arXiv · 2603.19529
SurfaceXR: Fusing Smartwatch IMUs and Egocentric Hand Pose for Seamless Surface Interactions
Abstract
Mid-air gestures in Extended Reality (XR) often cause fatigue and imprecision. Surface-based interactions offer improved accuracy and comfort, but current egocentric vision methods struggle due to hand tracking challenges and unreliable surface plane estimation. We introduce SurfaceXR, a sensor fusion approach combining headset-based hand tracking with smartwatch IMU data to enable robust inputs on everyday surfaces. Our insight is that these modalities are complementary: hand tracking provides 3D positional data while IMUs capture high-frequency motion. A 21-participant study validates SurfaceXR's effectiveness for touch tracking and 8-class gesture recognition, demonstrating significant improvements over single-modality approaches.
Explore related subjects
Keep this discovery
Explore connections, maps & timelines
Vasco Xu, Brian Chen, Eric J. Gonzalez, Andrea Colaço, Henry Hoffmann, Mar Gonzalez-Franco, Karan Ahuja. 2026-03-19. SurfaceXR: Fusing Smartwatch IMUs and Egocentric Hand Pose for Seamless Surface Interactions. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.19529
Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.