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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.
I'm guessing all it has in common with the Tolkien metal is it's price.
Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
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.
Because nothing says, "Please kick my ass," quite like wearing your computer.
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
I cant wait to see some hot chick in a Palm Pilot
Doctors do Massage in Longview WA now, who knew?
I can see some useful embedded applications (excuse the pun, ho ho) in having portable computing power, but look at the photo - the weight of it all. I'll wait till they get it a bit more slimline. Reminds me of 80s "mobile" phones compared to today. Why's it all so cumbersome? ok, batteries I understand we still have to work on, but the rest?
You didnt put my jacket in the wash.. er.. did you?
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
Gives new meaning to "running Linux".
I'm so funny.
As for its potential street cred, I don't think the combination of bare computer hardware, Linux and a Tolkien-derived name will see you having to beat off the hotties with a shitty stick ;-)
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Have anyone of you thought of going into music store, asking if you could test if a cd played properly in your "portable cd-player" (external cd-rom drive connected to the laptop in his backpack..) and rip it while chatting away with salesman how RIAA is doing the right thing and how you at least support them all the way.. heh heh
Preserve old classics: copy your collection onto all hard drives.
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"
There's been a few comments about how the whole wearable computing thing is silly, and "it's an MIT" thing. Let me clear this up a bit. Maybe it started as an MIT thing way back in the late 50's/early 60's, at least according to this paper. But I know Carnegie Mellon has been working on this stuff for over 5 years because they had ongoing wearable computer projects when I was a freshman there in 98'. And there's a lot of others besides MIT and CMU working on this stuff, just look here under the Organizations section.
This area of technology is already being targeted at consumers. Try to have a little imagination and realize how powerful this technology could be. For example, what if you had a little speech translator that fit in your ear, recognized nearby spoken speech in foreign languages, traslated it to your language, and used a voice synthesizer to repeat it back to you in your native tongue. Just wait a few years and you'll be saying "damn, I need one of those".
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.
Make clothing that cleans itself.
Make clothing that dries itself.
Make clothing that automatically reacts to the weather etc.
But putting a computer in your clothing, just doesn't make sense!
Technology should be intelligent, useable, and not make you look like a freak while using it (Bluetooth wireless headsets come to mind).
-- "To ask a question is to show ignorance; Not to ask a question means you'll remain ignorant."
when u take it in the rain and it shorts out.... will it be a smoking jacket?
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.