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MIThril Jacket Showcases Wearable Computing
Codeine writes "The Seventh Annual International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC), to be held later this month, will again feature members of MIT's Media Lab showing off the group's MIThril jacket. Taking its name from J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy, the jacket combines body-worn computation, sensing, and networking in a clothing-integrated design, according to the project." According to a new paper (PDF link) to be presented at the conference, the latest version of this long-evolving system uses a Sharp Zaurus running Linux.
Wasn't Mithril an extremely tough, lightweight metal? If you take a look at the picture, it looks anything but light & sturdy.
WHY would I want to wear a computer?
Don't get me wrong, I'm a geek, but technology is just getting absurd. I have no desire to "wear" my computer. Nor do I have any desire to play games on my cellphone. (In fact I don't even own a cellphone because of the hideously overpriced services).
Maybe I have to hand in my geek membership card, but wearing a computer ranks right up there with wearing a refridgerator.
Integration is all good, but as for integrating functions into clothing I believe it can be at the expense of flexibility. I would much rather have a lot of functions integrated in my mobile, and be able to bring those functions with me in situations that I might choose another attire.
In this day an age why the hell is anyone putting stuff together with so many cablkes. I can count at least 10 in the picture! Surely they can do better than this with the Bluetooth and Wireless possibilities that exist now? Nice idea, but I think I'll wait for the StarTrek Tricorder hologram projecting version instead
"If it's lost, it'll turn up. Things always do" "I love it when a plan comes together"
so you would rather have to dig out your cellphone and dial from it instead of having you cellphone as a device on your belt and you simply say "dial steve at office" to dial steve's office number and then talk to him through the bluetooth headset?
what you want is EXACTLY a wearable computer. just make the "cellphone" a black box with no buttons or silly microphone + speaker, oh and give it a decent processor, ram, storage, etc...
nahh give me a wearable computer with a cellphone attachment.. think pcmcia card here...
90% of the hardware you see is power and battery management. and that is the biggest problem. batteries today are a complete and utter joke compared to everything else... almost no power and life for a gigantic size.
wearable computing is very cool, I used to be faster at typing on my handykey twiddler one handed keyboard than a regular keyboard. do I still do the wearable computing thing??? nope. but I'm not in college anymore with thousands of hours to spend on my projects (or get credit and funding for my projects!)
but wearable computing is going that way... It's that you call it a cellphone and think of the phone as the central piece where as the "phone" really is a small accessory to the main computer.
the thing holding it back is dirt cheap bluetooth and batteries that dont royally suck.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
1. to be under $500 2. to have sensory feedback ;)
3. to be something that does porn
I had to wade through more buzzwords than I could handle before encountering any plain, simple descriptions of what the thing actually does. The site comes off like venture-funded arm-waving. The only thing it lacks are stock pictures of young business suits standing around shaking hands and smiling confidently.
Aside from the display goggles, it doesn't look like there is nothing particularly cutting edge about the hardware. If you can do something interesting with a 25-pound PC strapped to your back and a big fat extension cord trailing behind you, it won't take MIT undergrads to stuff the applications into some lightweight jacket-mounted hardware. Thus, it's all about the applications.
So what about the applications? Where are they described? I don't know. I got about as far into the site as I could before my little eyelids started to droop and my tongue started falling down the back of my throat, and I still didn't know what the killer apps were that I would be running if I had that jacket on right now.
So, without a clue about what that jacket can do now, here're a few things I can think of that I would want it to do. Maybe it does these things.
1) Something that allows me to quickly record, index, and play back audio and video snippets. If somebody says something, I want to be able to hear it again 5 seconds or 5 hours later. In the event of any Rodney King scenario, traffic stop, zeppelin accident, or anything else that one might want to have recorded later, I want to be able to start streaming whatever I'm seeing and hearing to remote backup.
2) Something that allows me to know where I am right now and how to get somewhere. I want GPS, Mapquest, and if I go hiking in the cascades with it, I want the optional emergency locator beacon too.
3) Something that allows me to surf. Finding restaurants and movie theaters and spare batteries will always be high on the list.
4) All the PDA stuff you can think of. Phone book, calendar, alarm (with a snooze button that isn't too hard to find) and a cell phone.
Y'know, when you get right down to it, putting this stuff on a jacket isn't really where you want it for day to day use. You want to stuff it all into something that you can put in your pocket. I think Nokia is already working on most of this stuff.