Interestingly, the Apple Watch pixels look very different from the iPhone pixels. This may be because the Apple Watch display is an AMOLED screen, I don’t know. But what surprised me was the actual pixel imaging sites are quite small in comparison to previous pixels in say, the iPhone. This may have something to do with reducing the current load in a device that is very power sensitive. It seems that almost all conversations at Apple these days center around 3 things*, power/current, which relates directly to heat and this display seems to meet those issues by reducing the size of the power consuming light emitting components while preserving the resolution required to meet “Retina Display” requirements.
The other item of interest for me, and I think the biggest advancement for wearables aside from the Taptic Engine is the capacitive component or pressure sensitive, touch screen component of the display which I revealed through a bright indirect fiber optic light illumination. You can see the contact elements as orange dots over the red, green and blue sub pixels. I’m even less sure of how the pressure sensitivity works, unless it combines a different imaging modality like an IR backlight, but it certainly helps build the magic mystique of the device and it builds into the Watch a powerful new interface feature. If I had an IR sensitive camera handy or perhaps my old pair of NVGs, we could run a little experiment there.
Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!
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Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!