A little friend that goes where ever you are
Aiko externalizes a person's health by visualizing it as a character that lives on your phone and watch. Aiko gets its energy from the user's activity data. It transforms walking into a fun, playful game.
With seed funding from Notation Capital I built a small team to create Aiko.
Team
Josh Knowles
Ashley Farlow
Asavari Kumar
Jared Halpern
Reeve Jolieffe
Niclas Kristiansson
Noah Schnoll
Alan Barasch
Outcomes
Walk with Aiko to level up your day. Your daily activity generates energy, which allows Aiko to grow, play and gain new powers. Stay active and be more aware of yourself and your day with a little help from your friend.
With the imminent release of the Apple Watch we set out at break neck pace to design the app that I had conceptualized before we even had our hands on the device. Many of our assumptions turned out to be wrong.
When the Apple Watch first shipped developers were very constrained with the amount of space their app could take on the the device. Animations were costly from a memory perspective so we had to figure out how to crunch them down.
We came up with ways color our little character on the fly by writing custom image processing code. For our team it was expensive lesson in how difficult it can be to develop something for bleeding edge technology.
In the end most our development time was spent creating the iPhone app.
Here is a trailer we cut together after six months of development time.
Aiko – little energy hungry beings that feed off your kinetic energy. We made them simple so that we could easily animate them and so that they would read well on the Apple Watch. Below you can see the full set of characters we developed at Katapult Studios after our acquisition.
Tap, eat, flip and spin. Aiko lives through movement. Step up your game; level up together
We created a whole set of characters provided fun ways to customize the app by giving users the access to wall papers and colorful, crazy patterns.
One of my favorite features in Aiko was our custom emoticons. As users leveled up they unlocked new emoticons that could be used in iMessage.
We released the characters on to the internet through an active instagram account and a steady stream of gifs on to Giphy.
