Apple turns to high-resolution photography, not CGI, for Apple Watch 'Motion' faces
The animated flowers, butterflies, and jellyfish seen on the face of Apple's new smartwatch were not created with computer graphics packages, according to a new report, but were instead photographed in an intensive process that sometimes required more than a week to capture a single image.
via Wired
"We shot all this stuff," Apple human interface chief Alan Dye told Wired, "the butterflies and the jellyfish and the flowers for the motion face, it's all in-camera. And so the flowers were shot blooming over time. I think the longest one took us 285 hours, and over 24,000 shots."
Apple photographed dozens of flowers, and multiple species of butterflies and jellyfish. Apple Watch owners who choose the 'Motion' face will be greeted with a new organism each time they raise their wrist --?butterflies flapping their wings, jellyfish swimming, and flowers blooming.
The entire process was completed inside Apple's design studio. The group temporarily added an aquarium to the space, capturing 4,096-pixel-by-2,304-pixel images of jellyfish at 300 frames per second on Vision Research's Phantom high-speed cameras.
According to Dye, "when you look at the Motion face of the jellyfish, no reasonable person can see that level of detail. And yet to us it's really important to get those details right."
via Wired
Dye also illustrated the team's detail-oriented approach with the Mickey Mouse face, saying that if multiple Watches are in the same room, Mickey will tap his foot precisely at the same time on each one. The Astronomy face, meanwhile, takes the wearer's position and the moon's phase into account to ensure that flying from the earth to the moon uses the proper trajectory.
The team took an equally painstaking attitude when designing the "three rings" interface on the Watch's fitness app.
"I couldn't tell you from a design perspective the number of iterations we did on those three rings," Dye said. The company was searching for "different ways that, at a glance, someone could understand that information, and easily assess where they're at in their day, and hopefully in a really simple and visceral way feel like they accomplished something when they fill them up."
The Watch's software seems to reflect its hardware, with early reviews calling the device "beautiful in a surgical way," and praising its high-quality materials and build.
Apple will begin accepting pre-orders for the Watch, which starts at $349, at 12:01 a.m. Pacific time on Friday. Devices will ship to customers on April 24.
via Wired
"We shot all this stuff," Apple human interface chief Alan Dye told Wired, "the butterflies and the jellyfish and the flowers for the motion face, it's all in-camera. And so the flowers were shot blooming over time. I think the longest one took us 285 hours, and over 24,000 shots."
Apple photographed dozens of flowers, and multiple species of butterflies and jellyfish. Apple Watch owners who choose the 'Motion' face will be greeted with a new organism each time they raise their wrist --?butterflies flapping their wings, jellyfish swimming, and flowers blooming.
The entire process was completed inside Apple's design studio. The group temporarily added an aquarium to the space, capturing 4,096-pixel-by-2,304-pixel images of jellyfish at 300 frames per second on Vision Research's Phantom high-speed cameras.
According to Dye, "when you look at the Motion face of the jellyfish, no reasonable person can see that level of detail. And yet to us it's really important to get those details right."
via Wired
Dye also illustrated the team's detail-oriented approach with the Mickey Mouse face, saying that if multiple Watches are in the same room, Mickey will tap his foot precisely at the same time on each one. The Astronomy face, meanwhile, takes the wearer's position and the moon's phase into account to ensure that flying from the earth to the moon uses the proper trajectory.
The team took an equally painstaking attitude when designing the "three rings" interface on the Watch's fitness app.
"I couldn't tell you from a design perspective the number of iterations we did on those three rings," Dye said. The company was searching for "different ways that, at a glance, someone could understand that information, and easily assess where they're at in their day, and hopefully in a really simple and visceral way feel like they accomplished something when they fill them up."
The Watch's software seems to reflect its hardware, with early reviews calling the device "beautiful in a surgical way," and praising its high-quality materials and build.
Apple will begin accepting pre-orders for the Watch, which starts at $349, at 12:01 a.m. Pacific time on Friday. Devices will ship to customers on April 24.
Comments
I understand Apple wanting to go with perfect detail, but unfortunately Wall Street and the whole tech industry thinks Apple is wasting its time and effort on things that don't even matter. Nearly everyone is bitching and moaning how AppleWatch is too expensive and the battery life is too short and this on a product that hasn't even hit the street's yet. Basically, the industry is saying Apple is not focusing on the things that really matter to consumers. Apple got a downgrade today because some analyst has already realized that AppleWatch isn't going to help Apple at all due to likely poor sales. He believes Apple is totally going in a direction that no one gives a damn about. Forget Mickey's foot-tapping. That's not going to be enough to get consumers to buy AppleWatch.
This is only one analyst but I'm willing to bet there are going to be a lot more Apple downgrades to follow.
I have no idea how well AppleWatch will sell, so it has nothing to do with my personal opinion. As an Apple shareholder, I simply rely on Apple to do what it does best and that is to sell products and I trust Apple knows what it needs to do to achieve that goal.
Amazing. This is what makes Apple, Apple. behind the scenes, they do a shitload more than they need to do, in every single aspect of product design. I recall constantly being stunned when finding out the lengths they go in every single process they undertake, whether it's manufacturing, engineering, media, or design. It's always a "holy shit" moment for me when they did 100x the effort I assumed they did, for a result that is arguably negligibly better for most people.
If Tim Cook (or Apple as a whole) really only cared about the bottom line, as people accuse him, he wouldn't allow this stuff to happen.
They're wrong. Just like they were wrong when they said Apple needed to race to the bottom of cost to fight all the Android cheap smartphones and thought it was all over when the 5c wasn't as cheap as they thought consumers needed.
Samsung learned that the hard way and have only gone to higher materials (and cost) with the new devices. Unfortunately, in my opinion, they've hurt their brand with less expensive plastic phones. It's an uphill climb to get into the "high end" space when you've been tarnished with "low end" stuff. One higher quality product isn't enough to change people's impression of your company. If Yugo made a high quality car on par with BMW... would you think Yugo is a high quality company overnight?
Relentlessly lowering cost at the expense of user experience won't allow Apple to compete. They'll eventually lose playing that game. Apple's only rational path is to focus on the user experience even at the cost of increased $. I don't know if that will work in the long run... but it has so far and is the only path for them.
In other words... they can't out cheap Tata motors or Yugo... they have to go BMW, Mercedes.
Subsidies/monthly payments make the standalone price of the phones less important. It looks like a lot of effort has gone into the watch faces but the end result is the 9 faces shown here:
https://www.apple.com/watch/timekeeping/
vs over 5,000 on other smartwatches:
http://androidwatchface.com/faces?showorder=4&page=1
The thousands aren't nearly as polished but they give people the ability to adjust the face to their own personal style or even mood. The Mickey Mouse face is well-animated but what adults wear Mickey Mouse watches and what children have watches costing over $350?
Apple obviously wanted to have complications and color settings as a feature of the faces and this probably limits how much customization they can give end users but I would like to see them make a faces SDK, maybe HTML5 or have an XCode SDK like Playgrounds so that people can build animated faces and share them.
I thought they'd use the railway clock as an option but I see they dropped that from iOS.
The Mickey Mouse face is well-animated but what adults wear Mickey Mouse watches and what children have watches costing over $350?
I thought they'd use the railway clock as an option but I see they dropped that from iOS.
I've known many adults who own a Mickey Mouse watch. It's whimsey ... like that one tie they have in their closet with monkeys on it.
They had to drop the railway clock, they paid a ridiculous license fee to use it, and I'm sure it was not a perpetual license. If the railway were smart, they'd get that SDK and offer it up as a paid clock face.
I fully expect the customizable clock face to go the way of the custom ringtones via iTunes. Most will be copyrighted designs that will cost money, though there might be a few free options.
I understand Apple wanting to go with perfect detail, but unfortunately Wall Street and the whole tech industry thinks Apple is wasting its time and effort on things that don't even matter. Nearly everyone is bitching and moaning how AppleWatch is too expensive and the battery life is too short and this on a product that hasn't even hit the street's yet. Basically, the industry is saying Apple is not focusing on the things that really matter to consumers. Apple got a downgrade today because some analyst has already realized that AppleWatch isn't going to help Apple at all due to likely poor sales. He believes Apple is totally going in a direction that no one gives a damn about. Forget Mickey's foot-tapping. That's not going to be enough to get consumers to buy AppleWatch.
And I'm willing to bet that Apple's fanatical attention-to-detail may actually be a major factor in getting people to have interest in the nascent smartwatch industry. Rather than haphazardly putting as many half-baked features and options as they can into a product, as most of the industry does, they focus on a few features and make them truly outstanding. This is something that competitors who are creating a product simply by putting together hardware and software from a number of different companies just can't do.
Companies could make promotional faces like have a countdown to a particular event e.g a Batman v Superman face with a timer until the launch and when the timer is done, the face can link to places to go see the movie. Charities can have watch faces that people enable for a given day like Breast Cancer Awareness and they can even have codes on them for other people to donate, which they might do via ?Pay and they can get some kind of reward for getting donations. For teen girls, music bands can have official faces that show upcoming tours, maybe geolocated with dates, reminders and directions. Having to wade through thousands of tacky and copyrighted designs is not likely something a lot of people would do but I could see value in having official ones and the SDK will let people choose other designs if they want or just design their own.
It's like hoping Apple will let developers drastically alter the look of the iOS UI.
Thankfully Apple have more sense and the interests of people with taste at heart.
The variety of high quality faces Apple provide - especially with the variety of complications - are more than enough for discerning folk.
If you want a crappy watch face - or a different one of thousands of crappy watch faces each day - get a crappy Android watch to go with your crappy PC
Mind you, before you ask, yes I think it was generally a mistake letting people put wallpapers on their iPhones
Unfortunately I can see Apple allowing people to create watch wallpapers in a few years time after pressure from the clueless masses or rather the clueless media.
I can say however that MM will not be going on my wrist.
I love how this is supposedly overkill and unnecessary but every time a new Android phone comes out with more MPs and higher resolution screens just because they're spec whores we don't get the same criticism from the tech press.
Having to wade through thousands of tacky and copyrighted designs is not likely something a lot of people would do but I could see value in having official ones and the SDK will let people choose other designs if they want or just design their own.
I don't disagree with all of that. Great marketing ideas. But is such a thing available now for the iPhone? I'm wondering why countdown wallpapers , or other iOS integration aren't already being used this way.
Either way, with Apple, they don't currently make it easy to create your own ringtone, so I don't see them making it particularly easy to make your own watch face, at least at first. My guess is they will want to control the experience as long as possible and curate the watch faces via the app store.
Groan. You're back, with your incessant whining! Tell me something's new....
Umm.. Tata Motors owns Jaguar Land Rover, in case you didn't know. They've been largely responsible for turning that company around quality-, design-, and sales-wise. They're no Yugo-type operation.
Letting anyone design watch faces is not the awesome sauce you think it will be. I think it will be thousands of "PC home movies":
[VIDEO]
EDIT: Huddler inserted the video tag, thanks!
There would be thousands of bad ones but also dozens of nice ones and they can be curated:
[VIDEO]
There's a whole load of these:
Woz can even have virtual nixie tubes:
or the original Apple Watch:
For added effect, they can have depth and use the accelerometer and gyro to create a shadowing and parallax effect of the watch hands.
Apple likes people putting decals on their laptops because it's creative. This kind of customization is like virtual decals. Some designs are copyright but the same is true of decals. If an SDK allowed you to install basic code like web apps then they don't have to police anything. The API would simply have a UI refresh rate and have a data feed, which basic code like Javascript or Swift can use to position and rotate elements (PNG layers, possibly aPNG or HTML5 to allows for vectors).
Umm.. Tata Motors owns Jaguar Land Rover, in case you didn't know. They've been largely responsible for turning that company around quality-, design-, and sales-wise. They're no Yugo-type operation.
So that would validate my original argument. The fact that you have to tell me that Tata bought some companies and now makes quality vehicles means the Tata brand is tainted. Until I own a high quality vehicle that says "Tata" and not "Jaguar", "Land Rover", etc.... I will associate Tata with the cheap vehicles of the past. Changing customer's perceptions of a brand takes years...
Samsung should probably put out a high end branded phone if they want to capture the high end like Toyota did with Lexus. That's a short cut anyways... start with a brand name at 0 and work up instead of fighting to get to 0.