One of the things Apple Watch owners will love to do is customize the watch face to their liking.
Apple
Apple created a ton of animated watch faces that you can personalize, but simply looking at the watch faces doesn't tell the full story. Wired spoke to Alan Dye, Apple's chief of human interface design, who revealed all the intricate details of the Apple Watch faces you probably had no idea existed.
- The watch faces of the animated jellyfish and flowers blooming aren't computer generated - they were actually photographed.
- Apple spent hundreds of hours filming different flowers blooming over time. "I think the longest one took us 285 hours, and over 24,000 shots," Dye told Wired.
- Here's how Apple pulled off the jellyfish animation: "They built a tank in their studio, and shot a variety of species at 300 frames-per-second on incredibly high-end slow-motion Phantom cameras. Then they shrunk the resulting 4096 x 2304 images to fit the Watch's screen, which is less than a tenth the size."
- The Mickey Mouse watch face is incredibly intricate - it taps its toe exactly once per second, and since all Apple Watches are aligned to the Universal Time Standard to within 50 milliseconds, you could line up every single Apple Watch with the Mickey face and they'll all tap their toes at precisely the same time.
- Alan Dye's favorite watch face is called Astronomy. "When you tap on the Earth and fly over the moon: We worked really hard with our engineering team to make sure the path you take from your actual position on the Earth to where the moon is and seeing its phase, is true to the actual position of the Earth relative to the moon," Dye said.
- Apple spent a year researching how it should display your fitness goals. It came up with the three concentric circles because, as Wired put it, "there's just something about a not-quite-complete circle that drives you just crazy enough to take those last 400 steps."
Check out the full story on Wired, it's worth a read.