Apple’s upcoming ‘iPhone 6s’ and ‘iPhone 6s Plus’ smartphones are said to include animated backgrounds inspired by the Apple Watch’s Motion face, 9to5Mac learned from sources. Of course, Apple has offered dynamic wallpapers since iOS 7, but it’s a single motif in seven color choices.
These new animated backgrounds created for upcoming iPhones are being described as sharing the same theme as the Motion face on the Apple Watch, which shows painstakingly crafted animations of jellyfish, multi-colored butterflies and brightly colored flowers.
“Apple is preparing to bring some motion from the Apple Watch to the iPhone 6s,” reads the report. The publication learned from three sources who have used internal iPhone 6s prototypes that in-house created backdrops for upcoming iPhones range “from sets of animated fish from a koi pond to colorful arrays of smoke. ”
It’s interesting that the most recent beta of iOS 9 includes a batch of new static wallpapers, including one depicting colored smoke against a solid black background.
Another sketchy evidence of spiced up wallpapers on the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus came yesterday in the form of a purported iPhone 6s packaging leaked by Chinese website cnBeta. As shown below, the alleged packaging features a gold koi pond fish wallpaper.
“Based on Apple’s internal testing of motion wallpapers, we now believe that box photo to be legitimate,” noted 9to5Mac.
In an interview with Wired earlier this summer, Apple’s human-interface chief Alan Dye described the insane attention to detail and craftsmanship that went into designing the Motion face for the Apple Watch.
“What Dye seems most fascinated by is one of the Apple Watch’s faces, called Motion, which you can set to show a flower blooming,” reads the article. “Each time you raise your wrist, you’ll see a different color, a different flower. This is not CGI. It’s photography.”
They used Phantom cameras to shoot many different species of jellyfish in 4K at 300 frames per second.
Then they shrunk the resulting 4096 x 2304 images to fit the Watch’s screen, which is less than a tenth the size. “When you look at the Motion face of the jellyfish, no reasonable person can see that level of detail,” Dye said. “And yet to us it’s really important to get those details right.”
For the blooming flowers on the Apple Watch’s Motion face, the team picked picked different flowers to photograph and then “trained a camera on them for as long as it took.”
A single flower took more than 285 hours and 24,000 shots to photograph.
Conveniently, Apple collaborated with Selfridges to create an impressive display that wraps around Selfridges’ London store. The display features blooming flowers and other floral motifs directly inspired by the Apple Watch’s Motion face.
And last but not least, Jonathan Ive, Apple’s Chief Design Officer, hinted in a lengthy profile for The New Yorker’s February 2015 issue that the Motion face on the Apple Watch’s OLED screen could make up for a nice animated wallpaper on an iPhone.
On the other hand, Ive cautioned the iPhone’s LCD screen technology would make it less magical because the Apple Watch’s display has blacker blacks than those in an iPhone’s LCD screen.
“An Apple Watch jellyfish swims in deep space, and becomes, Ive said, as much an attribute of the watch as an image. On a current iPhone screen, a jellyfish would be pinned against dark gray, and framed in black, and, Ive said, have ‘much less magic’,” reads the article.
Source: 9to5Mac