Imagine a smartwatch that uses subliminal messaging to programme your brain to be better at picking up members of the opposite sex. Now combine that with a watch face of a cute kitten and references to The Matrix and Freud.
And there, in a nutshell, you have The Dating Skills Smartwatch, previously known as The Pick up Girls Smartwatch, to be found raising funds on Indiegogo. Except it’s not: with two weeks to go until deadline the Dating Skills Smartwatch has raise an almost impressive 0% of its $10,000 goal.
That is maybe not a surprise: the Skills Smartwatch is almost certainly a joke (although to what end, we can’t say), with backers receiving a “silver lucky coin” in return for their support, which sports the legend “I AM LUCKY WITH THE LADIES” on one side and “I AM CONFIDENT, I AM COOL” on the other.
And yet the idea of dating apps and wearables is far from a laughing matter: in 2014 online dating giant Match.com launched its first wearable app for Android smartwatches, with the company’s managing director Karl Gregory telling News Week that the technology would “empower singles with more ways and opportunities to meet potential dates when they are out and about”.
The app allows users to receive notifications for Match.com “winks” and messages on their Android wearable – for singles “looking to maintain their dating lives without the need to constantly check their mobile device or computers”, the Match.com blog explains – and it will also locate singles in the local area as you move around.
Match has since launched individual Apple Watch apps for three of its biggest online dating brands: Match.com, OK Cupid and Tinder, which all do pretty much the same thing, shrinking their individual smartphone app to the Apple Watch screen.
And Match is not alone: in March Zoosk released an app bringing its “Behavioural Matchmaking” algorithm to Android Smartwatches “making on-the-go connections easier than ever for today’s singles”.
Again, the idea is that users will be able to check out potential dating matches without having to dig their smartphones out of their pockets. “Dating obviously lends itself very well to mobile,” Zoosk CEO Kelly Steckelberg tells CNBC. “It lets you be on your device at all times and so this is just an extension of
that to really interact very quickly.”
You would be excused a moment of cynicism at this point: what these two apps – and in fact most other dating apps for wearables – do is essentially replicate the smartphone experience on a smartwatch. That’s interesting but hardly earth-shattering.
Far more intriguing is Watchme88, a dating app designed specifically for the Apple Watch (although also available for iPhone). The app works like a radar for singles: users simply set preferences for age, gender and sexual orientation and whenever a match comes close their Apple Watch or iPhone will start to glow (a concept that works far better on the wrist-mounted Watch than on the pocketed iPhone).
Then there’s the forthcoming Close Encounter app for Apple Watch from 3nder, which the company describes in a blog as “a real-time blind dating app for open-minded people”.
“The new product category from Apple inspired us to create an app that gives you the opportunity to connect with open-minded people,” the blog continues, describing Close Encounter as “reinventing dating for wearables”.
That might be pushing it a bit. But what the app does (or will do) is certainly interesting. Firstly, it ditches photos in favour of what it calls “the surprise element of dating”, focusing on “personality rather than selfies”.
Rather than upload a flattering pic, users fill in certain biographical details, including interests and desires, and they will then be notified when “someone awesome” is near (presumably a user with shared interests), with local users represented as red dots on the Apple Watch screen.
If they then want to make a match, they can share their location and arrange to meet, although in a rather depressing (if necessary) addition, the app includes an “emergency mode”, which will send a message to your friends if you are in danger.
These are all promising uses of wearable technology. And yet for a dating app to really be native to the world of wearables, shouldn’t it offer something that your smartwatch can’t? Something that makes it unique to wearables?
For this, we have to turn to “Hands-Free Tinder”, an idea from design agency T3 which allows Tinder users to choose matches with their heart.
The app displays Tinder profile pics on your smartwatch, then monitors the user’s heart beat to see if it goes up (hooray, a match!) or down, thus apparently giving more accurate matches, unencumbered by stupid brain stuff.
T3 says the app is coming soon to the App Store and Google Play, although we suspect its road to market could be long and rocky and will almost certainly involve a name change.
Nonetheless, we hope it makes it: Hands-Free Tinder may have something of the novelty about it but if wearable technology and dating apps – two of the hottest categories in the tech world – are to have a beautiful future together then, like any stranded singleton, they’re going to need that initial spark.