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Good Thinking

The Visus Watch: Are two hands always better than one?

By Dave Parrack
November 28, 2013
The Visus Watch: Are two hands always better than one?
The Visus Watch from Mykonos Design features a stationary hand capable of accurately telling the time
The Visus Watch from Mykonos Design features a stationary hand capable of accurately telling the time
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The Visus Watch from Mykonos Design features a stationary hand capable of accurately telling the time
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The Visus Watch from Mykonos Design features a stationary hand capable of accurately telling the time
The Visus Watch features a woven steel strap and buckle
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The Visus Watch features a woven steel strap and buckle
The Visus Watch comes in two flavors: with the face available in simple black or white
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The Visus Watch comes in two flavors: with the face available in simple black or white
The Visus Watch features a woven steel strap and buckle
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The Visus Watch features a woven steel strap and buckle
The hours, minutes, and seconds sweep past the stationary hand in concentric circles
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The hours, minutes, and seconds sweep past the stationary hand in concentric circles
The Visus Watch from Mykonos Design could be a conversation starter thanks to its unusual face design
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The Visus Watch from Mykonos Design could be a conversation starter thanks to its unusual face design
The Visus Watch from Mykonos Design could be a conversation starter thanks to its unusual face design
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The Visus Watch from Mykonos Design could be a conversation starter thanks to its unusual face design
The Visus Watch is unisex, and therefore designed to be worn by both men and women
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The Visus Watch is unisex, and therefore designed to be worn by both men and women
View gallery - 8 images

Analog watches with just one hand aren't unheard of, but they are still far from the norm. The problem with this novel approach is that accuracy tends to take a back seat. The Visus Watch from Mykonos Design aims to change this.

The Visus Watch manages to retain a fair degree of accuracy by keeping the single hand stationary and moving the time past it, instead of the other way around. The single red hand remains in the traditional 3 o'clock position at all times, while the hours, minutes, and seconds sweep past in three concentric circles.

The outermost disc contains the hours along with their half-hour interstitials, the middle disc contains the minutes, separated into five-minute intervals, and the inner disc contains the seconds, with every fifth one once again displayed. You are therefore simply reading along the line formed by the immovable hand.

The face of the Visus watch is available in black or white, with a woven steel strap and buckle completing the ensemble. The Visus Watch is priced at US$50. The video below briefly shows the Visus Watch in action.

Source: Mykonos Design via The Awesomer

VISUS WATCH BY MYKONOS DESIGN ITALIAN TIEMPIECES 2013 www.mykonos-design.com

View gallery - 8 images

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10 comments
Dave Parrack
Dave is a technology journalist with a ravenous appetite for gadgets, gizmos, and gubbins. He's based in the UK, and from his center of operations writes about all facets of modern and future technology. He has learned more in his five years writing for the Web than he did in 11 years at school, and with none of the boring subjects thrown in to the mix.

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10 comments
Rt1583
I think the more accurate description of this watch would be that it has three consecutive rings that mounted in place of the traditional hands with a static demarcation line to set the watch and reference time from.
Ozuzi
Any reason why the red line isn't on the left side so the time numbers are in the correct order?
lleto
@Ozuzi: correct order and upside down? Problem I see is that the accuracy still takes the backseat. I also hope that it will be a lot less noisy than the video suggests :-)
Vincent Bevort
From a usability point of view this watch fails on all fronts
As mentioned above the digits display in the wrong order. It should be HH:MM:SS not SS:MM:HH as it is now.
The ring with the most details is the smallest one leaving very little room for the data The order of the numbers is wrong. People expect higher number to be below the lower numbers.
I have to look at least 2 times to figure out the time displayed. I expected better from an Italian designer
Captain Danger
I agree with Vincent High resolution is required to read seconds accurately and that ring should have been on the outside.
Russell Poley
You've just got to be kidding! First of all they are called Jump Dial, Jump Hour or Turntable watches. The design goes back to at least the 1930's when the dials would be covered up except for a small window and they are all over the internet.
I personally have four different versions of this watch and one that looks suspiciously like the one pictured here. I didn't pay more than $10.00 for each of them on Ebay. I hate to say it but they just aren't Gizmag material.
epochdesign
I owned a watch in 1990 that worked exactly the same as this. I bought it because it was a lot like a wall clock I designed and built about a year earlier. At the time it was new to me but I never bothered to research it.
lleto
Priced at USD 50 he is making some nice margins: www.ebay.nl/itm/Black-Silver-Quartz-Wrist-Watch-Boy-Girl-Lady-Womens-Mens-Turntable-Dial-Digital-/271020693288?pt=Wristwatches&var=&hash=item3f1a179728
Ralf Biernacki
@Vincent The reason for these flaws is because the inventors have been cutting corners to make the watch cheap to make. This means they were using a regular watch movement, attaching disks in place of hands. But a regular watch movement has the hour shaft on the outside of the minute shaft, and runs clockwise. That is what forced them to put the hour ring outside the minute ring, and to put the markings in the counterintuitive order.
It would indeed have been much better if the disks moved counterclockwise. Unfortunately, this would entail using a nonstandard movement running in reverse. I've seen such movements in novelty wall clocks, but not in wristwatches.
But I still wouldn't want the hours on the tiny inner disks---most of the time, when you look at your watch, the hour is important, and the second is hardly relevant. I prefer the hour written in bigger numerals.
Ozuzi
@lleto
I assumed that having the writing the right way up was obvious. Think about it