Vesper: A Small Bat

Vesper is a small bat who lives on your wrist, keeps the opposite hours to you, and has opinions about it. She is not a virtual pet. You cannot feed her and she will not die if you ignore her. She is an alarm clock with a nocturnal animal's perspective on your schedule: she is awake all night, and just before she goes to sleep at dawn, she wakes you up. In between, she reads your activity and makes flat, fond, quietly bleak observations about it. "You took 14,000 steps. To the same places." "Five hours and twelve minutes of sleep. I admire your commitment to the bit." "Your resting heart rate is 61. Mine is nearer four hundred. We are not the same." AN ALARM, THEMED AROUND A BAT'S DAY Set a wake time and repeat days on your Apple Watch. When it goes off she flaps, shrieks, and escalates her haptics until you deal with her, because she stayed up for this. Snooze if you must — she counts. There is also a bedtime nudge at dusk, when her day is starting and yours, by any reasonable measure, should be ending. SHE NOTICES THINGS Steps, active energy, exercise, stand hours, heart rate, and last night's sleep, all read from Health. She has 130 things to say and she tries not to repeat herself. If you have not given her health access, she still has plenty to work with: the hour, the day of the week, and your relationship with the snooze button. PICK HOW BLEAK SHE IS ALLOWED TO GET Gentle — she is worried about you. Melancholy — she has noticed, and has thoughts. Bleak — she is not going to soften it. HAND-DRAWN, AND ALWAYS THERE She is drawn by hand and animated live: thirty-seven animations — yawning, stretching, hanging upside down, hiding from the sunrise, sipping tea she cannot drink upside down, and staring into the middle distance for slightly too long. When you lower your wrist she falls asleep on the Always-On screen, and on your watch face and in the Smart Stack she is up to something new every twenty minutes. ON YOUR HOME SCREEN On iPhone she lives in a Home Screen widget — small, medium or large. Tap her and she reacts with a new line, then goes back to whatever she was doing. The iPhone app is only her settings: how bleak she may get, how often she changes, and whether she talks at all. The alarm itself needs only the watch. IN ENGLISH AND RUSSIAN Vesper follows your device's language. On iPhone you can also pick a language just for her. A JOURNAL Today's numbers, and the last things she said about them. YOUR DATA STAYS WITH YOU Vesper has no network code whatsoever. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is shared, there is no account, and there are no analytics. The health numbers become a line of text on your wrist and go nowhere else.