Sensor Watch at TU Delft

Originally published at Crowd Supply.

On Wednesday at TU Delft, Sensor Watch was front and center at a workshop on building minimal physical interfaces:

I worked with George Cave (Interaction Magic) to fit three Sensor Watch prototypes with a UART accessory board, which allowed them to be controlled over Bluetooth. Over the course of the day, students imagined new use cases for the humble Casio wristwatch, and used Sensor Watch to prototype them on the wrist!

George also designed a Casio Watch Prototyper that allows you to mock up interactions and play with them right in your browser. This is different from the Sensor Watch Emulator, which runs code as it would run on the watch. Instead, the Prototyper allows you to draw and animate screens of content to create an app purely from imagination. It’s an incredibly fun tool, and it’s helped me to think through watch faces that I want to build for Sensor Watch in the future!

News of the Watch

Speaking of the emulator: even without hardware in hand, folks have been using the Sensor Watch Emulator to get a head start on building the software that they want to wear. There’s one Sensor Watch app in particular, by Taylor Ertrachter, that I absolutely had to mention in this update: Wordle for the Sensor Watch!

The UX for this is absolutely brilliant. You make your guess, and the wrong letters vanish. Of the letters that remain, flashing letters (like yellow letters in Wordle) are present in the word but not in the right place. Solid letters (like green letters) are correct and locked into place. The limited segments in the bottom row do somewhat limit the five-letter words that are available for guessing; still I’m just blown away by Taylor’s creativity in building this! One of the things that most excited me about Sensor Watch was the idea that folks would come up with things I never considered. Wordle on the watch fits squarely in that camp.