Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
$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".
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 $4000.
The biggest gripe most people have about them (aside from their general bulk) is the awful Head Mounted Display (HMD) they use. It works by using a small 640x480 LCD display pointing away from you with uses a concave mirror to reflect the image back into your eye. There are a lot of problems with them - it's very hard to get the entire screen in focus and visible, you have this big arm holding the display in front of your face, and it's almost useless in sunlight. There's also the privacy issue of the fact that anyone can just look at the display itself (which, like I said, points away from you) and see a horizontally flipped image of whatever you're currently viewing.
A useful wearable device, almost more than anything, has to have a display that is easy to wear, small, and unobtrusive. I'm curious as whether this Hitachi device will achive that to a better extent than the current Xybernaut HMD.
Uhh or if your 18 then you could invest it now and that same 2000$ 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.