Displaying Data in a Colorful Way: Behind the Scenes with Designing Glance Clock
In our previous post we discussed the book Enchanted Objects, by David Rose, and how the ideas presented within it have greatly influenced the design of Glance Clock. Today, we want to delve even deeper into the design process of Glance, and show you the many small solutions we had to find in order to bring you our innovative smart wall clock.
One of the biggest goals we had in mind while designing, was that Glance Clock must be as useful as possible. Of course, the clock is very sleek and beautiful to look at, but we wanted to make sure that design never got in the way of functionality.
The first experiment we conducted was to buy an LCD display and combine it with a clock. Simple, sure, but the idea seemed great at first. The more we looked into it however, we found that there were a few issues to be dealt with.
LCD screens consume a lot of energy, and we found it was difficult, even impossible, to find a battery that would support a clock of this kind. We could have attached a power chord, but the energy consumption would still be vast, and who wants a power chord these days anyway?
Another issue was that LCD screens are generally square and not round. The roundness of Glance was important to us, we didn’t want to design something that felt square and framed. And then there was the final issue, that LCD displays are always lit and very bright. This was a big problem because we wanted Glance to be unobtrusive, a natural part of the home that only lit up when you needed it to.
So, we ditched the LCD idea and came up with something much better.
Say hello to LED lights! These are great because they are bright enough to show data clearly in daylight, but can also be dimmed to be less striking during later hours. Every pixel can be controlled separately with a display of LEDs, so it can be customized and made more personal.
This flexibility with the lights was very important to us. We knew from the very beginning that we wanted our display design to be dynamic. In order to provide the user with helpful information at the exact right moment, we needed to be able to show arcs, segments and rounded lines in color on the clock face.
Once we had our LEDs picked out, we wondered how many pixels we would need on the clock face. In this era of Retina and Super AMOLED displays that have thousands of pixels, it was a challenge to understand how we could create dynamic imagery with a limited number of LED points.
Other questions we had to ask ourselves included: should one LED indicate one hour or one minute? How many rounded lines should we display on a screen? What is the most optimal way to arrange and control the LEDs? And so on…
Wondering what we landed on? Well, we finally decided that our magic number is 48. Glance Clock has has a circle made up with 4 lines that have 48 LED lights per line. 48 LEDs requires a full load of LED drivers (since it is a multiple of 8), and thus provides very sharp image and a flexibility for showing 50 to 20 minute arcs in a precise way.
For optimum light output, each pixel is shaped as a small square. This setup allows for a unique secondary optic for each LED, making every pixel perfectly colored and sharp. We also used RGB LED lights, so each pixel can show up to 16M different colors and hues!
After we had figured out how to display data in a colorful effective way, we decided to add a textual component to the clock face. This way a user’s apps could sync with the clock and display information with words on the face.
So there you have it. A bit about the awesome Glance Clock face and how we came up with our unique design. Coming soon, more on the electronic design process and the many challenges we had to overcome in that design area!
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