MIThril, More Wearable Fun

whacked writes "For those that haven't checked the MIT wearables page in a while, there seems to be a bit of action. The MIThril project looks like a major advance on the original MIT wearable design, with features such as the body bus, `a branching single-cable power/data network.' An update on May 25 states, `We have finalized the plans for the first "release" MIThril'." They also link a design doc for Enchantment which has a ton of interesting bits about designing a Window Manager for a wearable. Don't expect to see an actual device any time soon, but for the far-out thinker, there's lots of interesting stuff to read and think about.

Comments

Ask me about Enchantment

[DaggerWare]

If anyone's interested, I'm the author of the Enchantment white paper that was linked here (hopefully my machine will survive the experience).

Anyway, I'm happy to answer questions on that or on the MIThril project in general.

Seeds of the Borg

[Alien54]

The typical knee-jerk reaction to all this stuff is to recall the Borg.

What people never looked at in the various trek series was how the Borg became the Borg.

My thought on this is that they would become the borg because in the beginning someone, somegroup, thought that all of that embedded/wearable technology is radically completely cool.

I can imagine the first network where a human can access computer data directly via a wire to that skull. Or where direct interfaces happen from brain to brain. Someone is going to have the equivalent of a religious experience as far as the significance of this vs Nirvana and the group mind.

People tend to become the things they resist. [Note for example, cops going criminal in their actions against crime] So already the seeds of the Borg are among us.

If you do not want to become a Borg in the present or future life, you will have to provide a better solution than the experience that the Borg will be.

Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip

Here's a happy thought

[ColGraff]

How often have you spilled coffee on an article of your clothing? Pretty often, right? Now what if that article of clothing had $1000 attached to it? Until wearable computers are waterproof, and in fact can take almost as much punishment as regular clothing, their usefullness will be limited.

By the way, who else felt pretty blue after reading the Swordfish review? :-)