NASA wants you to design a smartwatch app for astronauts

You just need to submit your complete design as image wireframes complete with the design for navigation, interaction, layout, look, feel, etc. Presumably, NASA will do the rest, or at least hire someone who can feasibly create the app for them.

In return for your efforts Nasa is offering up $1 500 (R19 180) and the prestige of knowing your design is being used in space everyday.

Crew Timeline application: Will display an agenda view of the timeline as well as a way to easily navigate to another day in the past or future. NASA, however, is hoping to take the intelligence of those watches to the next level, and has started a contest for the best smartwatch app design for astronauts.

The app will be officially called “Astronaut Smartwatch App” and it is likely to be used by Robonaut 2 – a robotic crew member that helps astronauts on the ISS, informed freelancer.com in a press release.

According to CNET, NASA’s astronauts are now in the habit of wearing manual-wind Omega Speedmaster watches, useful for their counter and stopwatch functions. Maybe not, which is why NASA has recently launched a contest on Freelancer. And NASA’s choice of the Samsung Gear 2 for the hardware reference is interesting, considering the common use of iPads to run operating procedures on the global Space Station.

The contest also is not a “design your dream app for astronauts to use in space”. Nasa also wants a Caution & Warnings element to the app that will use different colours to alert astronauts to different problems on the space station.

The app is required to show the status of audio/video communication between the vehicle and the ground station.

Another requirement for app designers is asking to ensure they provide appropriate feedback for actions, direct attention to the appropriate info for a task and data be clear displayed on the smaller Samsung Gear screen.