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Next Generation of MP3 Glasses
Doggie Fizzle writes "A review of the Nu Tech Dark Shadow 256MB MP3 Sunglasses shows one of the latest attempts to multitask common items, whether we want it or not. The Oakley Thumps may have come first, but at 3x the cost of Nu Tech Dark Shadows, even frugal geeks can look smooth... From the review: "I am a sucker for any tool or gadget that tries to combine more than one use or function into a single item, but I also have learned from experience that many times such items fail to perform well at any of the tasks they were designed to do.""
Seems like this would be the PERFECT product to have a rechargeable solar battery!
these bulbous pieces of shit look dumb on everyone, not just you. So do the oakleys. You are just not going to make a cubic inch of electronics look smooth on a pair of glasses. A product like this will be ready for prime time when you can fit the entire player in the eraser head of a mechanical pencil.
Wanted: Clever sig, top $ paid, all offers considered.
So now when I lose my sunglasses (which happens a LOT), I've also lost my 256MB mp3 player? No thanks.
... even frugal geeks can look smooth...
These are not for geeks, as can be shown by your idiodic comment (who "looks smooth" with a huge box attached to the side of your head?). They are for bikers, runners, and people involved in sports. They are not for a WOW playing geek in his mom's basement.
Ever try to bike through traffic while screwing around with a headphone cable? Probably not. If you did then you would see that there is a huge market for these kinds of devices.
Somehow, I just don't see these things catching on. They're ugly.
Do they expect me to *pay* for the luxury of wearing -- on my face no less -- something that looks like a Geigeresque metal-sheened plastic turd? I would be ashamed to leave the house wearing one of these. I might as well have a sign on my chest that says "Too much money, and no standards" And, to anybody who says these are for cyclists and such. Well. I'm a cyclist, I ride 50+ miles on weekends on a road bike, and I bike to work daily in downtown washington dc in rush-hour traffic. My iPod works *just* fine, and as a bonus, I still get to wear my real glasses, so I can see the taxis that want to annihilate me.
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I think mostly what us nerds object to is the conversion of two commodity "nerd tools" into an overpriced status item.
We want an Open Source sunglass+MP3 player!
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
What we've got here is a situation where computers have gotten easily small enough to be wearable on a purely practical level, but are still fighting against entrenched aesthetic norms. People hold up cell phones for seemingly hours at a time while walking around, even though they could easily have some sort of hands-free system. People put mp3 players in their pockets and run wires to their head, even though mp3 players could easily be fit somewhere near the ears. One can easily imagine a world in which it would have been cool all along to wear some kind of crazy cyberhelmet, and in that world we would have progressed much further into augmented reality. No use crying over spilled milk, so let's see what's possible with the culture we've got.
One possibility is that the barrier of aesthetic conservativism will be bypassed only once the size gets down to the point where it really is vanishingly small-- where a pair of sunglasses (or a necklace, or a bracelet, or a ring) with a computer in it is indistinguishable from one without. The computers will simply disappear, and the state of the art for most people in wearable computing will be whatever level is the latest to be effectively vanished.
The other possibility (the one which I, and I suspect most of us here, would prefer) is that there will be some new product or class of products that will change the collective aesthetic of our society and allow wearable computers to fully flourish. One entirely reasonable route for such a transformative device would be a pair of computerized sunglasses. Sunglasses are the largest head-mounted device which is a currently acceptable fashion. They are also conveniently close to the ears and even go in front of the eyes; they're perfectly situated to talk intimately with a user.
In order to effect such a transformation, a product would have to be a brilliant innovation either technically or aesthetically-- and probably both. The product under discussion here comes nowhere close to achieving that prerequisite. My guess is that the first mass market computerized sunglasses will be ones which can project some sort of display onto the glass.
<3
If you were my sig, you'd be reading yourself right now.