AppleInsider Staff
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.
"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 — Â 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."
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.
Malcolm Owen
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24 Comments
This right here is why I buy Apples stuff. And damn it even though part of me wants to wait for watch 2.0, this is why I am most likely going to own a sports edition before the month of May is over.
Good thing the aquarium story did not become public before now, or we'd be reading rumors about Apple's plans to breed digital fish.
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.
Downgrade the company on a product that isn't going to move the needle however "successful"? That makes no sense.