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Whereables?
d4 asks: "Thad Starner has been using a wearable computer daily since 1993, and Steve Mann has had an impressive amount of press coverage over the years. But if you want wearable computing in 2005, it seems you must build your own system. Why, after all this time and attention, are wearables still not commercially available?"
The technology has not been advanced enough to the point that hardware can be small enough as to avoid making the wearer look like a complete moron. And, even if we had acheived that point, there isn't much use for 'wearable' computers. Exactly what do you need one for? You can't use a regular GPS and/or PDA to do everything you would need to do while mobile?
...you just didn't notice. (Okay, actually, they're not available to the public yet, but a couple of review sites have gotten their hands on working models.)
Fossil Abacus Wrist PDA
Okay, this is probably more the inspiration for asking the question rather than what was being sought, but it's still a computer that you wear.
--Ender
Loose things are easy to lose. You're getting your hair cut. They're going there to see their aunt.
A former boss of mine has an excellent question he always asks regarding requests to acquire new technology: "What's the problem for which this is the solution?" The lack of an answer to that question is the answer to the question posed by this thread.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Not only that, but consider the niche they target. Plenty of niche requirements are not commercially available.
Example: where are the consumer targetted RAID-capable NAS units? Sure, I can buy RAID NAS devices from plenty of vendors, but a quick peek shows Iomega's chepest RAID capable unit over the $1,000 range new (and don't go spouting off on remanufactured units on ebay; that doesn't count). This is a simple example, but the NAS from other vendors is pretty much the same deal. Consumer-line NAS exists, yes, but consumers NEED RAID. They never run backups, and they're usually storing things like digital camera photos that they'll never be able to recover after an HDD crash. This need has arguably existed for several years, and I'd happily recommend a zero-maintenance box with two mirrored 80GB drives and an ethernet port in the $500 range for tons of non-techies that I know. I've seen one ethernet-based disk by some company I don't know of that claims RAID support, but I'm not sure how, since it exists as a stand-alone single-drive model (does it start mirroring over the network automagically?). Buffalo seems like they might finally be stepping up to the plate, but for a long time it's been "roll your own or fork over $1,000 more than you can justify."
Or:
Hot on the heels of the SFF story, we're only now starting to see actually-for-sale SFF computers, as opposed to bare-bones units. Sure, there've been skinny corporate-targetted workstations for a while, but the pseudo enthusiast who wanted an SFF-like computer either built it from components or lived without one. It's only been in the last nine months or so that I've seen these things available on shelves or somewhere other than an obscure whitebox retailer's website.
So in addition to being bulky and useless, wearables are so totally niche right now that there's no money to be made in commercially providing one for anything other than a total specialty area.
That is what I am waiting for. Something small, unobtrusive, and no less stylish than glasses. It would be really cool if you could have it be a semi-transparent overlay over the real world. It would be even more cool if a system could be implemented to feed you realtime info about what you are looking at.
But I get the feeling I'll get one of those for free with my Flying Car that I will have won as part of the opening sales promotion of Duke Nukem Forever.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks