Aliens Movie Motion Tracker

Seventeen metres. Twelve. Eight. They're inside the room.

The M314 motion tracker from James Cameron's Aliens, cut down to a watch face. The tracker's fan fills the lower half of the dial and rocks slowly left and right, the way the Colonial Marines' dish did. A ping leaves the centre once a second — a soft blue band that crosses the whole face and passes behind the instrument panel. And then the contacts: two clusters, one closing from the left and one from the right, blinking where the sweep last found them, each blink a step closer than the last. Under the fan, on the blue housing, the range counts down in red.

THE MOTION TRACKER

The fan is the film's: an outer arc with brackets under it, a hood over the apex with brackets of its own, three spokes and their ticks, all in a pale blue. Measured off a capture of the prop, redrawn line by line, and set rocking six degrees either side of upright.

THE PING

Not a line. A blurred band, dark blue, leaving the apex and running out past the rim — with a second one always behind it, so the dial never goes quiet. It crosses the readings and the clock, and passes behind them: the panel and the clock are drawn over it, filled, so the sweep runs under the instrument.

THE CONTACTS

Six on the left and nine on the right, blurred and overlapping — a crowd rather than a constellation. They do not slide. A group shows where it is for half a second, goes dark, and the next time it shows it is closer. Four blinks and they are inside the fan. Then something new is at the far range, and the approach is a different one: five randomised approaches, rotating.

THE HOUSING

Under the fan, the tracker's blue casing, with a dark window let into it the way the prop's own readout sits under its screen. F.E.M.S 2.058.81 on the left, CX. 12/42.07 on the right, and in the window the range — red figures, in metres, counting down with each blink and holding between them. A tracker reports the contact it has, not the space where one was.

THE INSTRUMENT PANEL

Across the top, an ENERGY panel in three cells: your steps and how far through your goal they are, the weekday and date over your pulse, and a seven-bar energy gauge over the charge left. Under it, the time in hours, minutes and seconds — no captions, just the figures. The gauge fades from blue to steel and turns red at one bar.

WHAT IT SHOWS
• Hours, minutes and seconds, 12- or 24-hour
• Weekday and day of the month
• Steps taken, and step goal as a percentage and as a ring around the dial
• Heart rate, live
• Battery, as a seven-bar gauge and a percentage
• A motion tracker that pings, rocks and finds things

ON THE WRIST

Leave always-on enabled and the instrument goes dark, leaving the hour and minute alone in a dim blue that drifts a few pixels each minute so no pixel carries a stroke for long. Raise your wrist and the tracker comes back up, pinging.

YOUR DATA NEVER LEAVES YOUR WATCH

Your steps and your heart rate are read on the watch and shown on the watch. Nothing is collected, nothing is stored and nothing is sent anywhere — there is no server to send it to. The body sensors permission is the only one asked for, and it is what lets the pulse appear at all.

NO ADS. NO SUBSCRIPTION. NO ACCOUNT.

NOTHING ELSE TO SET UP

No menus to learn. Install it, choose it, and the tracker is sweeping. It follows your watch's 12- or 24-hour setting.

An Aliens watch face: the Colonial Marines' handheld radar from James Cameron's 1986 film, the one Hicks and Hudson carried through Hadley's Hope on LV-426 and Ripley carried down to the Sulaco's hive. A retro sci-fi HUD in the blue-white of the Nostromo's and the Weyland-Yutani readouts, with the xenomorph closing in.

An unofficial fan-made tribute. Not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by any film studio or rights holder.