One of the objectives for Arkio’s 1.7 release was to enhance the capabilities of the wristband UI⌚. Sitting on the user’s wrists, the wristband UI serves as an easily accessible interface for the user to perform actions such as entering or exiting mixed reality mode, locking the model in place, opening the home panel, and accessing tool-specific settings.
The wristband UI
The wristband has been a part of Arkio’s user interface since day one when it was used to display the currently active tool and tool-specific settings. It later became extended to provide users with always-accessible shortcuts to quickly perform frequent actions. As the industry transitions from controller-based input to more natural interaction modalities, such as hand and eye tracking, the wristband UI which sits on top of the user’s physical hand and reacts to direct touch is here to stay!
What’s new?
One of Arkio 1.7’s headline features is improved support for co-located meetings. This motivated us to make the Arkio meeting experience even more seamless by providing shortcuts for meeting-specific actions from the wristband.
Hosts are now able to gather the meeting participants with the press of a single button on the wristband while meeting participants are provided with the option to jump to the meeting host—in case they get lost! The host can further turn on Arkio’s brand-new Auto-Gather feature 
, which enables users to seamlessly walk through models as a group.
As an extra quality-of-life improvement, you can now glance at your bracelet in meetings for useful information, such as whether you’re muted or not.
In addition to the new meeting-specific improvements, users can now simply press the active tool icon on the wristband to disable the tool!
Revised design
Recent advancements in XR technology allow for better blending of the real and the virtual, which opens up possibilities of showing users real hands through the virtual environment. As this is something that we aim to support in the near future, we decided to remove the unused segment of the bracelet, to avoid the problem of occluding the user’s real hands with the back part of the wristband.
The previous design of the wristband included three columns of buttons when fully extended, and was therefore quite bulky. To make the wristband more sleek, we’ve reduced the number of columns from three down to two and made the buttons smaller. We also increased the wristband’s radius, which flattens the arc and alleviates users from having to extensively turn their wrists to look at the buttons.
Finally, the wristband was moved further down the wrist to avoid intersecting with Meta avatar outfits!
Next steps!
With the release of Apple Vision Pro, we’re looking into making our UI responsive to gaze, as well as improving how our UI reacts to gesture-based input. This includes introducing hover states for buttons and tooltips that react to gestures and gaze:point_up:
I hope you enjoyed reading this summary about the development of Arkio’s wristband UI. We are excited to finally share with you all of the work we’ve been doing as part of Arkio’s 1.7 release! 
– Embla (embla@arkio.is)
I feel like these ux deep dives can really help illustrate the relationship of controllers vs keyboard and mouse