An Apple Watch That Watches
Mark Gurman
Who watches The Watchmen? Soon, your Apple Watch, perhaps:
The company is working on new versions of the Apple Watch that include cameras. As with the future AirPods, this would help the device see the outside world and use AI to deliver relevant information. These models are likely still at least generations away from hitting the market, but they are on the road map.
As part of this plan, Apple is considering adding cameras to both its standard Series watches and Ultra models. The current idea is to put the camera inside the display of the Series version, like the front-facing lens on the iPhone. The Ultra will take a different approach, with the camera lens sitting on the side of the watch near the crown and button.
As has been the case with those long-rumored (also by Gurman) AirPods with cameras, I'm still not sure I 100% understand this notion. But the tie-in to the "Visual Intelligence" aspect of Apple Intelligence at least starts to make this make more sense, I suppose. Still, are you going to get fully clean and clear shots with such a camera system? Undoubtedly not, but will Apple's algorithms be good enough to understand what you're looking at – er, what your Apple Watch is looking at – even with a potentially partially obstructed view at a weird angle?
Apple is probably considering this approach because the thicker Ultra has more room to work with. It would mean that an Ultra wearer could easily point their wrist at something to scan an object. A Series watch user, meanwhile, would have to flip over their wrist.
Yeah but by "point" you presumably will have to do a move like Iron Man does when shooting out wrist rockets. Or maybe James Bond with his laser wristwatch?1 Or if you have a non-Ultra Apple Watch, you're presumably making even weirder gestures to let Visual Intelligence "see" what you want information about. At least the AirPods with cameras would be closer to your actual line of sight and you wouldn't have to move them around? Is any of this easier than just using your phone, which also has the benefit of a giant screen to see what you want from what you're capturing?
Of course, the one upside of a camera behind the screen on the non-Ultra watches would be the prospects of a fun Inspector Gadget-like video-calling Apple Watch.2 Sadly, there's no plan for that, it sounds like:
Ideally, I’d love these cameras to also support FaceTime, but that’s probably a far-fetched idea. For one, the screens are too small to provide a good videoconferencing experience, and holding up your wrist for long periods for time can get uncomfortable. The technical challenge of moving the FaceTime app to the watchOS operating system wouldn’t be a major hurdle, though.
Yeah, I could see it as a fun little feature if they can pull off the actual cameras here.
At a bigger picture level, it's sort of interesting how many cameras Apple is aiming for you to have on you at all times now. There's the two camera systems on your phone (front and back), the AirPods, and now the Watch. And, if you're one of those weird people who takes the Vision Pro out and about, you have them on your face too. A few years further down the line and we'll undoubtedly have some sort of actually wearable AR glasses as well. AI pins?
Much like the world is mapped by our devices from a geolocation perspective, and to a lesser extent with still pictures and video from our phones, we'll seemingly soon have real time imagery from multiple devices all the time.
1 Which he takes off to use in GoldenEye and Die Another Day, though doesn't in (the unofficial) Never Say Never Again. Or the grappling hook watch in The World Is Not Enough. And who can forget the watch in Octopussy? "Very handy."
2 As an aside, at first my mind went to the Dick Tracy watch, but actually, that didn't have cameras, it just just for audio communication. And then I remembered I wrote about that concept well before the Apple Watch. My post in early 2013 was all about the then-new and now newly reborn Pebble!