NASA wants you to design a smartwatch app for astronauts in space.
The NASA Tournament Lab (NTL) is asking members of the public with programing skills to help design a smartwatch app that will assist astronauts living and working in space.
"The challenge is to design the general user interface for smart watch applications for use on the International Space Station," NTL wrote in the competition description on Freelancer.com.
NTL is asking people participating in the contest to use the Samsung Gear 2 as a "hardware reference" for the design, and the app should have the ability to perform a variety of functions, streamlining an astronaut's daily life.
At the moment, Space Station astronauts use laptops and iPads to look at their tasks each day, but the smartwatch app should be built to display a timeline of current, past and future tasks, NTL said.
The smartwatch app should also have a caution/warning application, a timer and a communication status application that "will display whether or not the vehicle is currently able to communicate with the ground through either voice/video," NTL said. All these functions should be included in a single app.
This general design should:
Direct attention to the appropriate information for a task and increase efficiency
Provide appropriate feedback to actions
Be legible on the smaller Samsung Gear screen
Innovative representations [of] data displayed on a smartwatch is highly encouraged.
The contest comes with a $1,500 prize, and the competition ends Sept. 9. You can enter on Freelancer.com.
You can also explore other NTL contests open to the public through the NASA website.