Watch faces in wearable tech are almost all screens. It’s the most obvious feature of a new breed of smartwatch, from the Moto 360 to the upcoming Apple Watch, two of the biggest devices in the category at the moment.
It’s the freedom that these devices afford users that’s one of the biggest attractions for wearables, users can push texts and other notifications direct to their wrist. However, that being said the screen most users will see the most is the watch face itself.
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Playing further on that concept of freedom, Android Wear wearers will soon be free to customise their watch face, changing the look of that most commonly viewed screen to something more personal to them, or something that better reflects their individual tastes.
Fashion designers and pop culture icons are poised to have their graphics emblazoned on the front screen of Android Wear devices, with offerings designed for style, such as beautiful visions from designers such as Hugh Turvey and Rebecca Minkoff, as well as more fun fan themes for titles such as Plants vs Zombies and Despicable Me.
There’s also the typical parade of cute cat designs, futuristic gadget looks, artsy drawings and all the other stuff you’d find on a reputable outlet offering skins for digital services, except on your smartwatch, everybody can catch a glimpse.
On a satisfyingly deep level, it feels like the beginning of an age where one can customise their outer appearance through digital media. We believe this to be one of the most pioneering aspects of wearables today.
The official developer tools to create these watch faces have come direct from Google, so the practice is now official – up until now developers had to tweak their own ways to get the faces to work.
This will mean that in the next few weeks hundreds of new faces will appear on a brand new section of the Google Play Store. Several will be offered for free, but of course there is money to be made for Google, so expect some premium offerings amongst the freebies.
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It’s not yet fully known if an official, or suitably reliable app will arrive which lets users select their own images to be used as watch faces, or create their own in a streamlined manner from within the watch itself. Whether Google will integrate such a feature or one will be created by thirds parties is yet to be discovered.
Other Android Wear updates have also come at the same time as the watch faces update, such as a recently used actions list as well as brightness tweaks, the ability to block notifications and a better battery management system for those notoriously short battery lives found in a lot of these early generation wearables.
Check the Google Play store for more info, we’ve left the link below.
Source: Google Play Store
Via: Techspot