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Is the Rise of Wearable Electronics Finally Here?
ptorrone writes "MAKE Magazine takes a look at the last ten years or so of 'wearable electronics.' From wireless watches to LCD goggles, MAKE predicts we are collectively entering a new era of wearables. As the price for enabling components drops, always-on connectivity in our pockets and purses increases, and access to low-cost manufacturing resources and know-how rises, we'll see innovation continue to push into these most personal forms of computing."
I didn't appreciate you while I owned you
Circuit board: $10
Computer chips: $80
Soldering iron: $30
Looking like a huge dork: Priceless.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Wearable electronics are a pipe dream and will never happen! ::looks at watch:: oops running late got to go!
-- Flame me and I will happily flame you back. Bring it!
And maybe 2012 is The Year Of The Linux Desktop...
as this is one of his 7 failed predictions 4 articles down I call "BITCOIN"
Didn't the WHO mention something about a link between wireless radiation and cancer recently?
Just a thot... :-)
AC and PROUD!
But with one hand weighed down by a wrist computer, how will we operate our digital watches?
It seems like every 5-10 years or new development points to wearable electronics. First, transistors, then microchips, a decade or so ago, it was small lithium batteries, now? compact wireless. Of course i didn't RTFM, but we've been "wearing" our electronics for years. Carrying cell phones has been the status quo for a decade, walkmans/diskmans for longer. Yes, we carry more electronics every day, but I still wear a timex ironman which has the same functionality as the timex ironman I got in 1994 (indiglo FTW!). However, I doubt that people will consent to wearing t-shirts that monitor heart rate, undies that take/analyze stool/urine samples, and shoes that measure stress as long as you can get cheap clothes that look good and are comfortable. Also, the average person can, you know, feel what's going on with themselves and if they're the kind of person who would buy a watch to monitor heart rate, they can take their pulse by hand and will. How many people do you know regularly check their pulse? Especially when not exercising?
Wearable electronics are in direct competition with simple sensors that feed into your smartphone. Integrate the electronics into a garment and you only get to wear it once a week (more if you're grody) or however often you do laundry. Watches do lots, but people like not having to recharge or change batteries more than once a year.
Gonna get some phat lewtz when I gank you outside of your house
http://www.pocketcalculatorshow.com/nerdwatch/fun2.html That was the first computer I wore. Didn't help me meet girls back in Grade 12 - I wonder if today's wearable electronics will help better?
Can someone tell me when we ever had wired watches?
And since I had an LCD wristwatch about 20 years ago, I'm not sure what this business about "wearable technology" is talking about.
I walk the dog with a radio clipped to my belt listening to the Sox game, and I've been doing that since about 1965 (though with a different dog and mono earphones).
So what, now we're going to have another round of LCD glasses that suck? Didn't Microsoft have some extremely stupid service with wristwatches that got downloads of information over a decade ago? That went nowhere, too.
Why are LCD glasses and watches with WiFi considered "wearable technology" but 3G smartphones you can put in a pocket or wear on your belt and media players that clip to your shirt pocket are not wearable technology.
I'm too weary to look at anything but the RSS feed headline to this article. Is it another link to some horrible Conde Nast ad-story?
You are welcome on my lawn.
make magazine should take a look at the increase in cancer and sterility as a result of always on devices (or even sometimes on) and proximity to the point of the cancer. We are entering a new era for sure, and it may not be too pretty either.
I'm a software developer and a friend, who is develops hardware solutions, and I teamed up with a small sewing company, which we are also friends with, to discuss wearable electronics. We spent an entire day pouring over documents, examples, internet content, blogs, existing products etc. to come up with marketable ideas such as complete products, hobby components, kits anything and anything else except we just couldn't come up with anything. Maybe we just aren't creative enough but so many of the existing ideas out there are just 'let's put LED's on it' rather than functional reliable products which actually do something. All the ideas we came up with were either unreliable, outside of the markets price range or could be or already are being done (usually better and cheaper) by existing products such as your phone. As much as a I want wearable electronics to be a success and the next big thing, I just can't see any useful marketable applications beyond a niche set of things like tracking and visual art, or as I said, maybe we just suck.
...computer/GPS/music library/reality augmenter/camera (stills and video)/video player/game machine/ebook reader/web browser/storage device that allows me to communicate with virtually anyone anywhere at anytime and fits in the palm of my hand? Or is this cooler because you can wear it?
The typical geeky wearable electronics system these days (not counting wristwatches or holders for smartphones) is a Lilypad Arduino, some LEDs and switches, sewable conductive thread, and a battery pack. You might or might not end up soldering - a lot of the parts are connectorized or made for sewing with conductive thread.
The expensive, hard-to-find part - the creativity it takes to make something interesting that you'd actually wear more than once.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
This is my contribution to wearable electronics:
http://www.ondatechnology.org/project-life-bracelet.html
Onda Technology Institute
some stanford and ucla cs faculty are working on similar stuff, check out their site www.pivotmylife.com, especially in their product review section.
Here is my contribution (working with some Stanford and UCLA computer science faculty) to wearable sensors: http://www.pivotmylife.com/ Prof Ron Fedkiw is also teaching a seminar next year on this topic, entitled "Cellphones, Sensors, and You". Check out his website for a description http://physbam.stanford.edu/~fedkiw
No mention of ghetto blasters? Those are wearable too. OK, you need big shoulders, but still...
No its not. But aren't those transition lenses magic.
A crappy article whose sole existence is to sell crappy over priced cuff-links for the elitist iCrowd! Bash Sony for going against hackers then promote Apple themed products? Really? How hypocritical.
Um... What? All my watches have been wireless - even the "self-winding" one.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Human senses, not merely be another way to surf the web. A HUD style implant in the retina or the ability to see other spectra of light like Jordi's visor would be useful. You know, general bionic man stuff. That's cool
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
we need more solarkini's!!
Funnily enough, I've been looking at this recently. I still don't get quite there don't seem to be many low-cost monocular wearable displays out there, even if tethered to a desktop. I personally would love to be able to read on my phone on the way to work without worrying about walking into traffic, or to free up monitor at home for a messenger by placing it up on one eye. Surely the explosion of mobile devices out there mean low-cost small displays are common enough to do this now?
About the only wearable displays I can find that are anywhere close to sensibly priced are the Vuzix displays, but by covering both eyes they're only really usable sat on a sofa. I've honestly been considering buying one just to cut it in half and build a mount for one eyepiece. And all of this is without going into AR devices, as clearly the issue here is as much coming up with the functionality and controls to make it happen.
Is a Fleshlight a wearable electronic? This is very important to me kthxbye.
I got this one. I've studied this area as a fan for about six years now. Here we go.
Take all your nouns and stick them on a NASA gyro and spin them all sideways into the other sentences.
You said:
Can someone tell me when we ever had wired watches?
And since I had an LCD wristwatch about 20 years ago, I'm not sure what this business about "wearable technology" is talking about.
I walk the dog with a radio clipped to my belt listening to the Sox game, and I've been doing that since about 1965 (though with a different dog and mono earphones).
So what, now we're going to have another round of LCD glasses that suck? ...Why are LCD glasses and watches with WiFi considered "wearable technology" but 3G smartphones you can put in a pocket or wear on your belt and media players that clip to your shirt pocket are not wearable technology.
If it's in your pocket, it's not "wearable" because it's just one more thing crammed into your pocket. Unless you have a few tricks enabled, to use it you ... pull it out of your pocket. Then it's not being worn. Clipping it to your belt is an odd hybrid I'll pass on. Belts are like the Switzerland of style - we expect large objects to be clipped there that don't look right anywhere else.
That leads into what is in fact a profound part of the field that hasn't quite made the discussion. Wearable tech has to be stylish. All those jokes about bad style are the court jester telling us the way it is. Now, those bluetooth earbuds - that's your first clue we're starting to do things right, combined with the social change needed in tandem. Tell me those don't look like the first small piece of the Borg ensemble! I wouldn't have predicted those would cross the rubicon of cool, but someone made it work so here they are. Right. Next!
There are about four signature types of wearable tech that are the science fiction holy grails, and apparently there's room for a few more wildcards like those bluetooth earpieces. Let's start with watches! I had one of these mp3 watches (though lower capacity at the time.) (Ps. the USB cord tucks into the watch out of sight.)
http://store.usbwatches.net/xonix-1gb-mp3.html
Would you have pegged that as a Music Player!!? (I think wearable tech is Matrix-Urban, so I liked that design. But for the dinners & ties crowd there was another one that looks like one of those "you made salesman of the week" company bonuses.)
Elsewhere in that story about the Best Buy - iTunes Required disaster, people were starting to chime in that they missed the simple mounted mp3 players. Who needs this cloud junk? Wear your music collection on your arm! And for the icecream on top - remember that mp3 players are flash drives with extra hardware? So 1GB can also contain your entire mobile data collection! Wired Watch. Check.
LCD Glasses are the next one, but also one of the hardest! Look, there's the court jester reminding us about style again. Turns out that you need the components to be brutally small to hide in the glasses form factor. The Smart Phone is getting close - it's packing the beginnings of usable computing power into Hand Size form factor. So you can't quite get the whole computer into the glasses yet. But you don't need to! THAT's the use case of the pocket! You can get away with clunky stuff in your pocket. So the glasses are ... wait for it ... the ulimate in privacy! A monitor that no one can peek at! No more furtive switching tabs between your manly sports feed and Lady Gaga!
The good news is that they are almost here! The article is once again the court jester grudgingly admitting that we're close enough on the style front that it's "safe for the masses to talk about." It's not a great article. (Quoting articles from 2008?! Really?!)
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
:)
The thing is, often there's no point.
I don't have ears on my wrist, so why would it be practical to have a *watch* store and play my music ? You'd need a cable from the watch to the earbuds, and that sounds horribly impractical and dorky.
You could make the earbuds wireless, say bluetooth, but then they need their own independent powersupply and electronics anyway, so in that case, why not simply store the music in the earbuds themselves ? Why use watch+earbuds to solve a problem that earburds can solve alone ?
I like this post http://tinyurl.com/4yn3fuq
ptorrone runs Makezine. Poorly. It's long been an irrelevant, masturbatory waste of time. At best, you got fawning credulous stories about a concept sketch some hippy dippy graphic designer came up with, or some bullshit knitting project. At worst, you had Becky Stern posting garbage about how to be an asshole to others in public.
Sorry, guess you don't have a "be nice policy" here, Phil.
THAT's what I want!!!
OK, now you've got me. I need me some data gloves.
I've experimented with various types of devices for controlling musical instruments since about 1980 (including "wearable technology") and though I've had some interesting results, nothing has really allowed improved much on the theremin.
Data gloves... OK. Thanks, TaoPheonix.
You are welcome on my lawn.
you can get a nintendo powerglove on ebay for about 25$.
Dungeon Tactics : Free Open Source SRPG
hah! MAKE is doing fantastic (i don't run it) - but there are over 200k+ people at maker faire each year, the advertising and print sales are great and *unlike* every other "magazine" MAKE is profitable and not going out of business. maker shed is multi-million dollar business and one of the largest open source hardware providers online. but hey, you have an axe to grind either MAKE, me or becky - it really doesn't matter how well MAKE does. in the DIY space MAKE is tops, you know that.
you're an anonymous commenter on slashdot, talking about what *others* are doing and making on a day-old post - think about that :)
There has been some being written about the wearable electronics in the past few years and nothing in the local markets, that it seems like a practical joke. Unless, the power supply issues are resolved, these future -proof devices are going to just going to remain in the lab and tech magazine pages.
You're talking 1st gen wearable tech. Now let's talk about further down the line. Clothes that will regulate temperature, that can change color, texture, on command. Clothing that can detect biochemical agents in the air, clothing that can do whatever your imagination can come up with.
The real holy grail is clothing with these functions, because everybody wears clothes everyday.
Call me a dork but my phone is clipped to my belt. I'm approaching the age when I may need a digital hearing aid. My glasses aren't technically electronic but at the atomic level everything is and they adjust to ambient light. We won't get into pacemakers, insulin pumps... None of these items are exotic.