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Affordable Wearables May Arrive By Christmas
Rhinobird writes: "I was just catching up on some stuff and ran across this article on New Scientist. It describes a new Hitachi wearable computer which is planned for a release of Christmas 2001. More info can be found at Hitachi's site here(1) and here(2)." These will come with Windows CE officially, but unofficially, how long could it take to make them run other OSes as well? At $2000, wearables might finally hit a lot of toylists.
That screen is so obviously a screenshot from a PC rotated and softened. It is much less sharp than the 'IBM' logo and it's not reflecting any hilights or showing any lowlights.
And it is windows.
ghaa.
mental note to self.... check no Score +1 when making idiotic comments for the hell of it
I won't buy one of those - I can imagine walking down the street surfing the web, an then being attacked by some drunkard yelling: It's the Borg, get 'em!
Just by way of a specific example, here's the NetBSD sh3 port. Despite the port's name, SH4 evaluation boards, the Dreamcast, and "SH3/4-based WinCE machines" are all supported.
Do you have a
And then (seeing they are running a Microsoft OS), CodeRed III r00ts them all, and everybody turns into remote Zombies attacking anything open source!
No Thanks!
I submitted this weeks ago and it was rejected.
-Kevin
Those baseball hats that carry 2 cans of beer are the pinnacle of wearable utilities... Affordable too!
The secret of success is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake those, you've got it made. (Marx)
Where do these displays exist? I want a little display that will support at least 640x480 resolution (and color) but I'm having trouble finding one for under $3000.
Those are a cool concept... but they're incredibly expesive ($1500-$3500) and low resolution (I just want 640x480, but they don't come close)
These will come with Windows CE officially Great, can't wait til I have to piss really bad an can't unzip my pants due to a BSOD =)
In US lawyers will have field day with these.
I forsee X billon dollas lawsuits of people claiming
their eyesight was damager, or they simply crashed their
car while browsing porno sites while driving.
The FaQ says that the display is only for one eye and is semi-transparent. I'd somehow prefer a display that extends over both eyes; screw both my eyes at the same time.
How long do you think it'll be until there are law's against wearable computer's while driving like the NY cell phone ban. If talking on the phone is distracting, what about P0RN!!
Here is a photo of an IBM prototype.
Interesting example display (tiny, very clear, may be a complete mock up): I can't tell whether or not it's MS Windows, but it's surely Netscape.
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
How soon we forget! You can get the source to Windows CE and modify it to do whatever you want (not BSOD, for example). And IIRC, you can distribute any modified code, as long as it isnt for commercial use.
Wouldn't it be much simpler to linux-ify Windows CE, than to CE-ify Linux?
At $2000, wearables might finally hit a lot of toilets
No, that's those $450 cameras.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
Flight mechanics of Lufthansa use wearables.
Guards at the mexican border use wearables.
Soldiers in Kosovo use wearables.
Maybe you're looking the wrong way?
If I'm correctly decoding the URL of the pessimistic note, it's a year old.
This is just a stock SH4 machine with custom peripherals. *BSD has been ported to many such devices, and so has Linux (Dreamcast being the first that comes to mind, but there are SH4-based PDAs which are probably supported too).
... to develop" a device like this. They look serious about it, but for now, it's still vapour.
If demand exists, and if the product rolls out in quantity at a decent price point, distributions for pick-your-favourite-*NIX will be out in short order.
Bear in mind that all we've seen as a "license agreement
What, me worry?
Plus they're the most effective form of male contraception ever.
HOW CAN YOU LOSE?!
At $2000, wearables might finally hit a lot of toylists.
:
For some reason, i first read that as
At $2000, wearables might finally hit a lot of toilets
Buying a Dell computer is equivalent to dropping the soap in a prison shower.
I don't know if I'll be able to afford to give this to both my boss, and my inlaws..
I love the idea of wearables. I'm sure most people who are at all acquainted with technology feel that way. But I'm afraid I don't see the market for them at this juncture.
Just look at the pda market. Palm and Handspring are on their last legs; Apple killed its Newton project; Sony's deriving some marketing value from putting its brand on every dog turd in sight but hasn't made much revenues. What the wearables market is supposed to be two years from now is what the pda market ought to have been two years ago, but instead we're left with a collapsing industry.
For the most part, people don't want to be chained to a machine of any sort. They'll spend obscene amounts of money on a computer they can shove under their desk, but they can't bear to carry one in their back pocket. To draw another analogy, look at the cellphone market. A few years ago, everyone was all excited about having one. Today, people purposefully leave theirs at home so they don't have to be just a phonecall away from the office.
Frankly, it'll be at least a decade before people start being amenable to the idea of integrating technological augmentations into their own personal space like that -- about how long it'll take for the generation weaned on mainstream internet usage to have an income to buy these things with. Before then, I'm just not holding my breath.
"we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!" --Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
Great... a wrist watch that requires 128 megs of ram and a 400 mhz processor. And how are you supposed to tell the time when it locks up? Really though... what the hell would you use one of those for... I mean, you wouldn't even use a palm when you are wandering around. I wouldn't anyway... probably trip over something and it'd end up in the middle of traffic.
$2000? For fuck's sake why would I pay that for an underpowered little computer? For that money I could have two or three high powered desktop systems, or better yet, one of those Apple titanium thingies if I wanted something portable.
You had me at "dicks fuck assholes".
MS has already collapsed, and certainly won't be around for Christmas. Who will write the OS for them? Or did MS open source everything before the went under?
This video shows a demonstration gone bad. It appears that a Windows CE handheld playing ancient Miami Sound Machine music shorted out while Balmer had it in his pocket.
Run and catch, run and catch, the lamb is caught in the blackberry patch.
I'll just wait till they release the underwearable computer, which ought to be *lots* more fun... ;-)
sigh. i did the ns story, and another link on the topic too. Oh well. I suppose having 3 links did it...
My current wristtop (that I wear every day) was purchased in 1986 and does log & trig and metric conversions.
I'll never get used to what is being passed off as "wearable". To me, wearable means wristtop.
Second, the linux port (Debian!) for this processor is already stable, homepage: http://www.m17n.org/linux-sh/, all we'd need to know is what kind of display it will have.
KITT! Keep your scanners peeled!
They should have included two Compact Flash slots. How am I going to get a 1 gig IBM MicroDrive and a IEEE 802.11b wireless lan card in there at the sime time? $2000 Wearable $400 Microdrive $200 twiddler2 $35 twiddler2 USB option gives you a small system with a big price tag $2635 but otherwise you are left with too little memory only a mouse input with the base system. It has potential we'll see.
...some nitwit wearing one of these and watching porn instead of where he's going will get run over by a sport-ute driven by some yuppoid talking on the phone? My guess: Happens in the first month they're on the market.
They should look just like normal glasses, be high resolution, large field of view, and have fully adjustable transparency (for augmented reality).
The rest can go in a backpack..
I've been pondering building my own wearable for several years now. I was fortunate to have some exposure to Thad Starner at Georgia Tech. I saw quite a few variations on the wearable in the halls of the College of Computing, but my main interest was in the "build-your-own" category, for which Thad has a few links for on his web site.
A $2K price tag is certainly more appealing than a $5K-$6K, but what's the point when you can build your own for less? Laptops are so thin/cheap/powerful these days that, combined with a Twiddler and some form of audio/video IO, you're set.
The Hitachi unit, on the other hand, has barely more horsepower than a handheld device. Do you really need a visor-ed CE device for $2K?
Step 1, post a few sentences that bears some semblance to the story:
"Rhinobird writes: "I was just catching up on some stuff and ran across this article on New Scientist. It describes a new Hitachi wearable computer which is planned for a release of Christmas 2001. More info can be found at Hitachi's site here(1) and here(2).""
Step 2, obviously post some anti-MS rhetoric. Slashdot readers love that:
"These will come with Windows CE officially, but unofficially, how long could it take to make them run other OSes as well?"
Step 3, post some mildly amusing but ultimately annoying "dept." comment:
""from the stop-wincing-in-disbelief dept.""
Wrap it up with another anti-Microsoft spiel if you can. We post at least one Microsoft article daily, and a majority of our readers use IE, so it'd be best to piss them off. Don't worry about the sub-100,000 userID's: those guys will defend us. They never leave.
I actually work with the Wearable Computing Group at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Most of our research right now is done on wearables from Xybernaut, the company that Hitachi is partnering with as mentioned in the press release. The Xybernaut systems we have now are regular p200s (192MB RAM, 4GB disk, serial/PS2/USB ports, pretty much all the stuff you'd find on a laptop) running Red Hat 6.2. When we got them, they cost about $4000.
The biggest gripe most people have about them (aside from their general bulk) is the awful Head Mounted Display (HMD) they use. It works by using a small 640x480 LCD display pointing away from you with uses a concave mirror to reflect the image back into your eye. There are a lot of problems with them - it's very hard to get the entire screen in focus and visible, you have this big arm holding the display in front of your face, and it's almost useless in sunlight. There's also the privacy issue of the fact that anyone can just look at the display itself (which, like I said, points away from you) and see a horizontally flipped image of whatever you're currently viewing.
A useful wearable device, almost more than anything, has to have a display that is easy to wear, small, and unobtrusive. I'm curious as whether this Hitachi device will achive that to a better extent than the current Xybernaut HMD.
Is the diagram where they show how it will look like a 13 inch screen at 60 centimeters... You've got to love the mixing of measurement systems
You could wear running socks running SOCKS
Uhh or if your 18 then you could invest it now and that same 2000$ could help you retire 5 years earlier. As a donation to a worthy cause 2000$ could help build homes in areas of the world hit by natural disasters (where they are often cheaper to build) and pay for medicine where needed ... You could also buy a lot of beer, or chocolate pudding and take at least 20 trips to *really good* restaurants.
Or of course you could also spend the money on a ***toy computer to wear*** ...
I guess it really just depends on your priorities.
Of course this will never take off. Next thing you know people will start stealing each others jackets. The airports would hate this, and it would be worse than the abusive cell phone users. There is no advantage.
Not much of a market unless they all use wearables when they're not being mechanics, guards and soldiers.