Thursday, July 23, 2015
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science associate professor Michael Terry and PhD candidate Adam Fourney are giving Pebble smartwatch owners the opportunity to put photographs of loved ones right on their wrists.
WatchPop, a company founded by Terry, Fourney, and wearables expert Kent Lyons, developed the app after Fourney's success in creating Sunshine, a watch face that imports the latest solar flare images from NASA. Shortly after Sunshine's release, people started asking how they could put other photos on their watches. From there, WatchPop was born.
To create WatchPop, the three founders drew upon their expertise in
human-computer interaction to design a simple, but elegant app that lets
users easily put personal photos on their smartwatch's watch face.
Their efforts seem to have paid off. WatchPop recently won an award in
the Pebble Timeline Challenge, a competition that recognizes apps
designed to work on the Pebble Time, Pebble's new colour-display
smartwatch. WatchPop has also been featured in the app store, leading to
thousands of users installing the app across the globe.
So what's next? Terry explained that WatchPop has started exploring an API that lets developers send pictures or other content to people's watches using the WatchPop backend. Read WatchPop's interview with Pebble on the Pebble Developers blog.
