As part of my ‘Research Residency’ this summer at Fathom Information Design, I had the pleasure to work along my informational family in a very interesting and peculiar project: the Fathom Watch Faces.
Fathom Watch Faces is an open-source project commisioned by Google as part of their Android Experiments. The premise was very simple: use art and design to push the limits of what is possible with the capabilities of Android devices and software.
We rapidly settled for the brand new family of Android Wearable devices, watches in particular, ready to explore the affordances in information design and provision in this new medium. The question became very interesting: what kind of information can be provided to the user whenever s/he glances at the time? Mobile devices usually play with environemt-related information such as traffic or the weather. But we felt there was much more to be offered to the user in terms of information that relates to him/herself, and is tightly tied to the act of checking the time. Several rounds of experimentation and testing led us to our three takes on this opportunity: activity tracking, playfulness and self-awareness.
You can download the Fathom Watch Faces from the Google Play Store.
(The following descriptions have been borrowed from the original publication blog post)
Coubertin Rings
The Coubertin Rings watch face motivates users to improve their daily activity. The model uses built-in sensors on the watch to display playful interactive rings that represent daily step counts. As users hit step milestones, the rings get bigger, change color, and scale up to quantify higher step counts (e.g. 10 steps, 100 steps, 1,000 steps). Splashes of color reward users for achieving certain levels, and motivate them to get to the next ring,
Bouncing Isaac
Inspired by light and physics, the Bouncing Isaac uses the watch’s built-in sensors to display playful, interactive, geometric patterns and colors that change throughout the day. As users move their wrists, various color patterns and forms emerge. The background color changes every hour, and the triangles are based on a sliding spectrum of highly saturated colors. The colors overlap one another as the leading point of the triangle hits one of the walls of the watch face.
Gaze Effect
The Gaze Effect watch face displays mysterious eyes that gaze back at users when they look at their watch. The more they check their watch, the more the eyes look back. In the later hours of the day, the eyes grow tired, and they move and blink less. At special times throughout the day, the eyes get especially eerie.
Fathom Watch Faces is an open-source project. Feel free to download the source code, fork the project and contribute to it! Additionaly, this project can be a good base to start developing your own watch faces.
Find out more about the project in the main page or the Android Experiments pages (Coubertin Rings, Bouncing Isaac & Gaze Effect).
Images and videos by Fathom Information Design.