Zombies, Run! CEO on the challenges of smartwatch gaming

Thank You introduction yes I'm CEO of six to start we are probably best known for a game called zombies lung which is a running game and audio adventure for the iPhone and for Android if this auger port and I'm not gonna talk about somebody's run a lot it's a game you play in the real world you've run outside it sold like a million copies it's been very successful the interesting thing about zombies run is we actually when we designed this we actually treated that there weren't any kind of really popular wearable smartwatches or Google glass when we launched this three years ago but we actually treated the smartphone as a wearable computer in itself because a lot of people when they go out running they have the smartphone on there you know on my rom you know it's like a big massive SmartWatch that looks really

stupid and if you have headphones with it it's a piece of hardware that allows you to interactive a game or to experience media and attend to two things at once which in our case was playing a game while running in the real world and so like I said you know if it was just if it was just a phone it wouldn't work if you were obviously running around because then you'd have to be attending to the screen you know you need to have headphones ideally wireless headphones which are becoming very popular so obviously the reason why people have interests in wearables again now even though we've had wearables for a long time with the pebble smartwatch with Android wear is because of the Apple watch which is supposed to be launching in you know March or so and you know I want to spend a bit of time talking

about this it's an interesting opportunity it's a big opportunity but of course just before I talk about that I do want to talk about some of the other variables that we've seen so obviously the Android wear watch we have looked at developing games for Android wear there are people developing games around girls wear and and sort of add-ons so far we've found that I mean to be perfectly honest they're not that many people using Android wear it's just not a big market I don't really see a lot of people buying that stuff and and the fact that a lot of Android wear devices are the kind of being salt or very low prices makes me quite concerned about the future of that of that platform for the moment I think you can get like an LG SmartWatch for like 80 pounds or 70 pounds which given that at retail that like 200 150 that's not a good sign so these all get better you know and they'll get cheaper but right

now we're not seeing the consumer demand and I think that's a bit of a chicken and egg thing that's not a lot of applications but maybe hardware it's just not right either Google glass kind of has to be mentioned when we talk about wearables even though it's sort of broken in so many ways we have actually made zombies run for Google glass because we thought would be an interesting experiment right now the battery life for Google glasses is no good the input is no good and you know it's too expensive and you can't use it when it's raining so it's a it's kind of an interesting experimental device but it's not really that consumers I think this will become vidiian classy in five to ten years time but having made an app for Google glass I would actually say sorry the people who are here from Google but it's not even worth prototyping on Google glass because this is so far from the consumer very piece

of hardware that anything you learn will not be valuable in the future unless you're a big company and you can afford to waste a lot of money which most of us aren't so back to smartwatches I just wanted to spend a few minutes talking about the different but we spent a long time at six to start thinking about okay let's imagine the Apple do go and sell 10 million 20 million 30 million Apple watches this year and also at the same time Android wear takes off because of Apple watch maybe or because it gets cheaper obviously you don't want to just like charge into making SmartWatch apps because it exists you know there's no reason to believe that it's gonna be like a gold rush as we have of the iPhone or whether levan void right there's no we don't know yet whether people are actually going to spend money on SmartWatch apps not that you can really kind of do that on iOS or even you know enhance existing apps but there are some new affordances

that allow for new kinds of experiences so for us this sounds kind of ridiculous but there are new forms of input particularly for situations where you are not able to look at a smartphone screen so I should preface this by saying whenever you're thinking about making a SmartWatch application or experience you've always got a wonder well why isn't some actually just gonna look at their phone because the phone's got a bigger screen a better screen it's got a bigger touch screen you know what are the situations where people are actually going to use a SmartWatch and those are usually when you're moving when you want to go or when you just for some reason um exercising you don't want to carry the phone with you now in those cases compared to what we having at the moment from something like zombies run where you know you're running in the real world and you've got your phone on your on your arm or in your pocket this means that you actually have new forms of input such as buttons you obviously have new forms of output so an ever-present screen that you can

sort of see all the time you obviously have new sensors crucially sensors in a known body position we've experimented a lot with trying to determine what users are doing without them having to provide any input so for example we make a lot of health and fitness apps and we would like to know when people are doing push-ups we would like to know when people are jumping or when people are skipping or running and of course if you're using the phone as a sensor that's great but people might be carrying the phone in different ways and different positions on their body and their pocket in their hand on their arm in a bag who knows whereas of course the good thing with a SmartWatch and was with you know where glasses is that you know where it is on the body and that can help quite a lot it's always available so you know you've we've all heard about the fact that people keep their phones with

them within you know one or two meters at you know at all times you know even during the night but of course there are times when particularly for people who don't have pockets right you know a lot of people you know a lot of clothes you know a lot of women have clothes that just don't have pockets you know my girlfriend's can't actually have a phone with her all the time but you can wear a watch you know this is actually quite big deal in terms of being able to interact and access information so that's a really useful affordance in terms of notifications and so on challenges again I come at this when a health and fitness point of view because I think that's one of the most interesting applications who work wearables we've done experiments with wearables we've done experiments with glasses it is hard to focus on a small screen while you're moving let learn why you're running like it's quite you know if you've tried walking around or even running around while looking at a smart smartphone it's not easy it's sort of jumping all over the place it will be

harder if you've got a watch and so and it will probably be unsafe actually so that's something you have to wear to think about if you do want people to go and look at your SmartWatch or your wearable while they're moving think of what is the absolute minimum amount of information that you can show maybe just show a color right maybe like red is bad and green is good maybe that sort of thing but you have to really simplify it because otherwise people will have an accident and that's not good if you're not moving why are people looking at the watch and not the phone you know why most people will probably still default to the phone if they want to actually get anything done so you kind of have the thing about you know under what circumstances does a watch make sense a little challenge and their battery life will see how big a problem this is and practice because if we can get people into the habit of charging their smart watches every night then it's gonna be

okay limited SDK certainly if any of you guys have looked at the Apple SDK the watchkit sdk that's not a huge amount you can do you can do some interesting things in terms of notifications in terms of sort of setting things off on the phone but particularly around wealth but particularly you can't have really the watch work independently from the phone and that's a case of most Android wear apps as well I suspect for early adopters that's not going to be a problem because they've all just going to have their phone and their watch on at the same time but that's not a massive audience and the biggest challenge is that you know I I do you know I don't want to sort of wouldn't put money on this but I don't think that smartwatches at the moment are quite there in a position to be owned by most

gamers and by most gamers I mean you know over fifty percent it's not going to be cheap the Apple watch is gonna be three hundred fifty dollars you know good Android wear devices or you know tuned good dollars unlike a smartphone you know everyone needs to own a smartphone pretty much you know not everyone needs to have a SmartWatch and so I think just a little bit of a dose of realism not many people are going to have these and it's gonna be questioned about how well that kind of works for you know particularly kind of freemium games opportunities continuous notifications obviously this is a good way to let people know what's happening in your game when your game world even when you know they can't look at the screen of course the flip side of this is this could be really really annoying even more in the wing than having so many notifications on your phone so you've got to keep this under control and do things that are kind of actionable ideally from the watch itself

opportunities for even shorter gameplay sessions in a way I think this is maybe just crazy I don't know if it was actually gonna play game on the SmartWatch I don't think that makes any sense but perhaps they can sort of go and make decisions about something that's happening on a game on their smartphone of course all sorts of cool new forms of urban physical fitness gaming you can imagine I don't know people run away from zombies in the real world that's what we do but you know running away from spies or you know exercising in parks or multiplayer games lots of different things are possible there but the problem that that you will have in the problem that we have had is that there are really very few successes in Fitness gaming and so it's you know it's just not possible to just go go out and they say oh you know what we'll do we'll make a clash of clans but better you know that there aren't many things to copy their pop from you know what we've done but that's that's quite specialized

so I think can I've taken the long view I think you all take years to sort of figure out what actually works here you know this is like the launch of maybe not even the first iPhone maybe even earlier than that and it won't be as big it won't be as big as smartphone or tablet gaming not realistically the future very quickly I think in the future is not just smartwatches I think it's a personal area networks it's watch phone headphones we're seeing wireless headphones become quite a big thing I think that's gonna be the big Christmas present this year heads-up displays that's further out like 5 10 years but that everyone wants that everyone want to terminate division even though looks kind of stupid at the moment Google glass I already said that yeah so take years to figure out what works so it's gonna be interesting but I don't know I'm not sure whether I just want to inject a dose of skepticism here and I suspect you probably all feeling that as

well so I don't need to do much convincing thank you very much thank you no surprise for me was I thought you'd be more or less pessimistic than me I'm I'm barely past mitigating the only in the short-term but I do play watch games so the Handy games guys that young guns and glory heroes game on the watch plays really well there's a spooky house to a48 style game it's it's amazing how there are those moments where you're sat on a bass waiting for thing if the classic thing we used to do with the phone when we were bored I'm finding I'm now doing on my watch but you're absolutely right it's the much smaller game session time yeah yes which is still fun it is but it's hard it's a new challenge of design and it's also I think very much goes to back to the sort of old days where I remember digital trucks are talking about the OneTouch gaming yeah if you remember that kind of period of Java games real simple I mean the interactions are

quite quite profound and we can swipe we can move we've got the accelerometer there's a whole bunch of things we could do but simplicity I think it's gonna be really the core of yeah I think my biggest problem I think is something you hit up I think with the notifications and and in particular that having to have your phone with you yeah I think that's actually one of the things I think is going to be the biggest kind of hindrance in many ways my example being the Galaxy gear s where you have to have a contract for the data for the watch as well as your phone yeah the next big step will be when the phone as a watch doesn't need a phone and we can already see I think next year LG are gonna have a watch doesn't require you know has its own cellular connection and that's that's cool that's that sort of next big step and that'll be exciting well LG did that with the in 2008 they had a video calling watch and it did have a whole bunch of connections but it was just way too early 2008 so so early and I mean I bore for hours on watches

and I've got an article like I say I just put in spot game on the subject so thank you very much I think it was really cool stuff