Apple Watch OSC

The starting point was a simple question: the Apple Watch is already collecting data about the body constantly, what happens if you actually route that somewhere?

I built a small iOS app in Swift to expose the watch's accelerometer and heart rate sensor over OSC, which TouchDesigner reads as a continuous stream of values.

The accelerometer gives you three axes of movement data — pitch, roll, yaw and heart rate gives you a slower, rhythmic pulse on top of that. In TouchDesigner I mapped these to visual parameters so that stillness and movement, calm and exertion, produced genuinely different outputs. What made it interesting technically was the latency problem. OSC over a local network is fast, but the watch's sensor polling rate and the iOS networking layer introduce their own delays.