NASA wants you to design a smartwatch for space

NEW YORK — National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has put out an open call on Freelancer.com asking the public to create a special smartwatch interface for astronauts to use on the International Space Station. It looks like those famous Omega Speedmasters might not be cutting it anymore.

The contest is open to anyone, and at time of publishing, five entries were already in progress, according to Freelancer.com. The scope of the project is pretty high-level, asking entrants to create wireframe images showing what apps would look like while displaying crew agendas, warnings and alerts, communication status, and various timers. The priorities are legibility on small screens, innovative representations of common data, and appropriate feedback to interactions. NASA’s guidelines also stipulate that designers should use Samsung’s Gear 2 smartwatch as a hardware reference for their creations.

There’s no stipulation that participants need to have the development skills to actually implement their designs, opening the contest up to a much bigger population of potential designers.

Anyone interested has four weeks to enter, and the winning designer will be awarded US$1,500 (S$2,108). While the prize money might not sound overwhelming, the resume line item and pride are likely motivation enough for those even considering the challenge. The contest is an initiative of the NASA Tournament Lab, a division of the Centre of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation, a branch that aims to bring technology and ideas from the private sector into the government agency.

As of now, independently developing something like this for the Apple Watch is impossible because of Apple’s restrictions. And NASA’s choice of the Samsung Gear 2 for the hardware reference is interesting, considering the common use of iPads to run operating procedures on the International Space Station. Switching even small parts of the station over to a new operating system doesn’t sound like a meager challenge.

Earlier this year, NASA also revealed that it’s working on computerised glasses for astronauts. BLOOMBERG