For as long as there have been astronauts in space, there have been wristwatches accompanying them, with the most famous being the Omega Speedmaster worn by NASA’s astronauts.
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That being said we are curious as to what kind of features a smartwatch for an astronaut could pack.
And the smartwatch would offer more than the watch, stopwatch and counter functions of the manual-wind Speedmaster, as classy as that is.
In return for your efforts Nasa is offering up $1 500 (R19 180) and the prestige of knowing your design is being used in space everyday. NASA’s Centre of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation aka CoECI has tied up with Freelancer.com, one of the top websites in the world for freelancers, to design the graphical user interface of the new smartwatch app.
The “Astronaut Smartwatch App” will first be used by the robotic crew member “Robonaut 2” now helping the astronauts on the orbiting laboratory.
Smartwatch app developers could soon see their ideas taken literally out of this world, as NASA is looking for someone to design an app for astronauts to use then they are in space.
The app will be used for a number of functions: to display a timeline of the crew’s agenda (past and future), show colour coded warnings and cautions and indicate whether the space station is able to communicate with the ground via voice or video.
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Provide appropriate feedback to actions: Be legible on the smaller Samsung Gear screen – innovative representations of data displayed on a smartwatch are highly encouraged. To get around this Nasa has decided to go hands free and has asked designers to use the Samsung Gear 2 smartwatch as a basis for their design. It’s probably just as well: Figuring out how astronauts are going to manage touchscreen controls while wearing bulky space gloves could be a bit more challenging. Maybe not, which is why NASA has recently launched a contest on Freelancer.
