Apple TV Reactions

Introducing 🥁🥁🥁… Apple TV Reactions! Apple TV Reactions is the best way to watch tv with your friends. Simply join a watch party and show everyone how you truly feel!

Ok, I probably could come up with a better name, but I feel this one encapsulates the idea pretty well. ATR was a weekend project to show off my rapid prototyping skills. Within 36 hours, I went from an empty Sketch artboard to a fully functional prototype. I believe this project highlights my ability to quickly invent, design, prototype, and engineer a solution to a problem. The problem? TV consumption is a siloed and isolated activity. How can we make watching TV more engaging and fun?

The solution I came up with was simple. I wanted to see my friends’ reactions to a movie or show in realtime. To do this, I embedded a reaction bar in the bottom right of an `AVPlayerViewController`. This bar served as the primary way to see your friends’ reactions while watching the content together.

With this piece of the puzzle in place, I needed a client companion app that made it very easy for the user to update and share their reaction as the content played. I wanted three pieces of information in the app.

1. What I’m watching (Title)
2. Who I’m watching it with (Participant Bar)
3. My reactions (Reaction Grid)

At first, I thought about using emojis for the reaction grid, but they lacked identity. Memojis quickly came to the rescue. After creating a couple of characters, my companion app was complete. I organized the memojis by emotions and picked the most common ones related to TV consumption.

Finally, it was time to connect the tvOS app to the iOS app. For the sake of the prototype, I used multipeer connectivity to talk between both platforms. After a couple more lines of code, my prototype was finished!