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Wearables From IBM Japan
Justin Time sent us linkage to another device that could put us one step closer to gargoyle land. The screen is monocle that displays a 10 inch screen. Runs Win98 (ick) and has 3 hours of battery life. Definitely looks like it has some potential.
Something y2k compliant!?
As if people will actually be wearing these in the next month!
Great minds think alike, this looks more like what I saw in the ad,
Thanks
Travis
Extremism in the cause of liberty is no vice, Moderation in the cause of freedom is no virtue. --B.Goldwater
Then you'd be skrood.
PC hardware, wearable or not, is developing faster than open source developers can write software for it.
My 2 kopecks...
I know that most of the wearable computers I've seen are in the preliminary stage. But do they really have to be butt ugly and bulky?
I mean they have to start making these things WEARABLE. That doesn't mean take a small laptop and and fasten it to your belt buckle. I mean make it sleeker, and make it look better. (This does not mean copying the new look of the Mac. Whoever designed that color scheme should be shot) Drop the grayish color and make that monocle smaller! I mean the greatest thing that happened to portable headphones was the earphone.
I think that is what will make wearable computers truly useful. Don't make the wearable computer do everything a computer does. Make it simple. Think Palm.
Man
Hm... I was thinking about those watches that use a small internal pendulum to charge their batteries using the kinetic energy from everyday walking and moving. Is there any way to use a similar scheme to power wearables, or at least extend their battery life?
my ideal portable computer would be a mix between the wearable concept and a laptop.. I would love to have a nice headset, with a semi-translucent display.. a nice little box that had the processor, memory, hard drive, and video card (Sound card would be cool cuz then i could have a pair of light headphones on as well).. and then a cell modem. I would want just a wireless infared keyboard.. something really small, and portable. I wear JNCOs a lot, the main unit would fit in a front pocket. and the keyboard could have a reall small case with a strap.. the total unit would be three pieces. (main unit, headset, and keyboard).. I do everything with a keyboard.. and this set up would work great with any operating system, be smaller, and even more portable than laptops. ideas? -Scott
This is one of the areas that a lot of progress has been made in. IBM's wearable gets three hours of battery life. Thad's wearable gets fifteen. Know what else? He never has his hard drives spin down or his display turn off. He accomplishes this amazing feat by using extremely low power hardware; his wearable is composed of PC-104 boards. You can find more information about the hardware at MIT's Wearable Computing Project.
The biggest obstacle to widespread acceptance of wearable computers, in my opinion, is the display. They are, at the moment, extrememly expensive. Quite a bit of technical progress has been made, however. Kopin makes some tiny displays (unfortunately no wearable designs shown on their page), but the ones we use most in the CCG are the ones made by MicroOptical. This page has a photo of the clip-on glasses display prototype; we've got non-prototype models in use, and let me tell you, they are sweet. They are extremely lightweight, slim, and space-age looking. Of course, they're also about $5000 apiece, but that's why we have grants. =)
Input is a bit of a problem. Nobody's developed an intuitive, easy to use input device. The Twiddler is the one most used by wearables researchers at the moment. It's a chording, one-handed keyboard with 12 keys (three rows of four) on the front for the fingers, and five keys for the thumb. It acts as both keyboard and mouse, as it has tilt sensors that let you control the pointer. The Twiddler is neat, and very useful, but it's about as hard to learn as touch-typing. MIT's wearables pages have some info on other input devices buried within them.
This is another potential obstacle to widespread use of wearable computers. Thad runs Linux (Slackware, I belive) on his wearable, and his interface to everything is: XEmacs! Yes, XEmacs, heavily modified to do everything he needs it to. One of the most revolutionary applications it uses is the Remberance Agent (PDF). This watches the files on your drive and what you're typing, and suggests a list of related files every 10 seconds or so. In this way, you can see things that might be related to what you're doing currently. For instance, if I'm typing up an article (such as this one), and I talk about Brad Rhodes, the Remberance Agent might display a filename such as "rhodes-RA.pdf", reminding me that he was the one who wrote the Remberance Agent. Or, if I'd met him at ISWC and put his name in "ISWC99-people.txt", that could come up and remind me as well.
Size is one of the least concerning of any of these issues. Technology will progress, and things will get smaller. Eventually, we can expect to have powerful computers that fit in our pockets, or on our wrists (check here for a wrist-sized palm pilot). Size is currently a consideration, but it's the least of them.
Easy, I've seen touch screen systems that work like this...
Have a graphical 'keyboard' with 'keys' that you click on (or touch) to input text! It's slow but it works.
But I don't know if you could do key combinations like Ctrl+Alt+Del which is so often needed in Windows...
I own a Palm, have used a CE machine.. And for being PDA's, the Palm wins. Yes, you can hide the Start bar. Regardless, the Palm makes a better PDA. The Os is designed to be 'on the go' and for taking quick notes, etc. A CE machine is like a mini-laptop.. So it is awkward to enter data into, the battery life is waaaaaay less then a Palm, etc.
The Start Bar was just my use of example that trying to make a portable desktop isn't the solution. Making a portable that's quick and easy IS the solution.
Perhaps we could make it look even funnier and try to extend the battery life of these devices... could you imagine a crowd of people with solar panel caps(sort of like those ones you are given for graduation ceremonies) all of whom have a true monocle(you know the one old rich men wear) wired to a computer. That would be cool... albeit scary, but cool.
um i think it was meant as a joke whack-boy
Because a lot of people (on slashdot) would prefer an opensource OS to run default on it. Thats all. I'm sure with some hacking it could run Linux, FreeBSD, etc fine.
Eww, how would you ever get any work done on such a small screen in a GUI environment? They don't even have hi-res VGA (640x480x16)? These wearables have a ways to go before they become the next Walkman or Palm Pilot. They'll get there, though.
>>I'm worried about this. Three buttons, in all permutations can only create 6 actions, which is just enough for a 2-buttoned mouse.
I count 7
00x
0x0
x00
xx0
0xx
x0x
xxx
Where x is when a key is pressed and 0 is when a key remains unpressed.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Let me guess what the 3 buttons are.
Control, Alt and Delete?
I use my PalmPilot without a keyboard all the time, and it works great.
Granted, it's a PDA, but the basic theory is the same...
-- K
So they say it will run win98. Think about it. It has a pentium processor, 64 MB of memory, and from the looks of things, a standard video and ps/2 port. Looks like you could linux it pretty easily. I think that portable computers are really cool, but many companies are still thinking in desktop terms. For instance, they're discusiing a keyboard? Pointless. The coolest thing about the palm pilot is graphiti. I heard of some people developing a language that would "type" via sensed finger movements. Repackaging a pentium into a small package is easy. Creating uncumbersome display and input devices is the hard part.
.
Like another reply stated, wearables have been around for a while here in the US. A couple of guys at MIT media lab were doing projects. Wired had an article a few months back...they described a very interesting "augmented reality". Some of the applications of wearables discussed (for personal use): Eyewear that recognizes faces and pulls up personal data on the person you are looking at, viewed through your flashy lenses Standard web surf/email stuff, also viewed through eyepeices In the work place, the applications are far more high tech and useful. The article described airplane manufacturers, mainly the guys who do the wiring, being able to use a wearable to follow a wiring plan. The plan would be projected onto an eyepiece similar to the one the woman in the photo was wearing. With it wirers could do the job by superimposing the plan onto their work and simply following the lines. Neat stuff. In all, wearables are dorky and bulky for personal use. What the hell are you going to use it for? If you do find a good use, is it worth walking around looking like a lost trekkie?
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Anyway, eyestrain is obviously an issue here, so making the material semi-transparent with a variable "depth" would be uber-cool, as it would allow for (limited) 3d visualization as well as other interesting features. It would also aleviate the eyestrain problem.
I saw an ad on TV for a wearable computer (like this, except that the little screen thing was smaller and closer to the eye) that was (supposedly) powered by voice recognition.
It was from IBM, too.
(Or was I just hallucinating?)
>I mean, especially since it runs Win98, it means you won't have enough time to install the darn thing... That's a little off the wall. With any machine, I can format and install Win98 in about 1 hour (depending naturally on how big the hard drive is and how long the format takes).
Those who talk do not know.
Those who know do not talk.
Keep your mouth closed.
Those who talk do not know.
Those who know do not talk.
Keep your mouth closed.
Yah, and then when they did come out, and you wore one and looked freaky, it was cool because you stood out from the crowd. Only thing was they were kind of expensive at first, but I remember being very proud when my mother shelled out $50 in 1985 dollars and bought me a real Sony Walkman. That player, built at the height of the robotic Japanese worker phenomenon, worked reliably up until 1994 when a roommate moved out and took it with him. Freaking bastard.
Hear hear! That's just one of the reasons these things shouldn't use voice recognition. Can you imagine hundreds of people shouting commands into the pickup mikes on their wearcomps all the time?
"NETSCAPE...SCROLL MODE...DOWN...DOWN...SELECT...CLOSE WINDOW..."
What a neverending cacophonous din!
Michael Gentili
- He's just some guy, you know?
Wearable computers could be cool, but I still think that no matter how they're worn, if they are worn, they will be clumsy.
Well, you make some good points, but I disagree about the "need" driving these gadgets. What will happen (you heard it here first) is that as soon as sports agents and other wealthy individuals start using them, and ESPECIALLY if the NFL begins showing assistants wearing them on the sidelines, the wearable will all of the sudden become hugely popular in a short amount of time. Manufacturers will not be able to keep up with demand, wearable computing magazines sprout and begin taking bribes (er, Advertisements) to promote favorable benchmarks between different models, and consumers will put up with the klunky interface so they can go around looking like Locutus of Borg. Fad and fashion will make the wearable take off, not when the wearable actually becomes "useful" and "needed" by certain occupations.
Self improvement is masturbation
I'm a member of the Cyborg Group (yes, that's actually what it's called :) at the University of Toronto, working for Prof. Steve Mann. As a member of that group, I work with and develope software for the latest wearable computing equipment all the time. One of the devices we have is the Xybernaught, which is a lean mean PII 233 with a couple gigs of HD space and a hundred or so megs of ram, all squished into a package about 5" long, 3" wide, and 2" deep. When we received these machines, they came preinstalled with Win98. We do all of our development using linux for numerous reasons, almost all of which have to do with the fact that windows IS a cumbersome OS for use on such platforms. The first test we ran was a power consumption comparison. When two identical (hardware wise) Xybernaughts were powered up together, one running Debian Linux, the other running the brand new, preinstalled version of windows, the windows machine sucked the battery dry much faster than the debian machine.
Michael Gentili
- He's just some guy, you know?
Quite proposterous... why not run it with *nix, or at least something vaguely y2k compliant.. also, does running win98 slow down your brain processes as much as it does with a normal PC?
Interfaces that fit with the available peripherals and peripherals that match the operating environment are important.
For a wearable computer, voice input and output can be quite valuable, though people will look at you funny for mumbling like a gargoyle. (Single-speaker voice recognition has been getting much better, very large vocabularies are available, and easily-portable disk drives for storing the necessary data are getting practical.)
The Data Glove that VR people were using for a while may be a good input technology, if the prices can be low enough - it's possible to do gestures and chords without needing to haul a keyboard around. Some combination of gestures and menus together probably makes the most sense for a non-vocal interface.
Communication is critical for wearables, just as it is for desktops. Some low-speed wide-area communication would be necessary for many uses, e.g. a few kbps for email, voice, and access to the user's other databases. For some uses, higher-speed mobile comms are needed, but in general, it's convenient to have ~1-10Mbps of radio or infrared for transfer to the main network when you're stationary (as opposed to jacking in to a LAN), and it's also valuable to have short-range communication with other users, though low-speed connections are enough for many transactions (e.g. paying for purchases, or stores telling you what's on sale as you walk by, or computers and other hardware providing operator input.)
Physical location is another valuable input, whether it's GPS or something cell-phone based or the kinds of infrared handshakes that some of the Smart Badge projects have used inside buildings. The more precise the location, the more applications are possible, and the more concerns for security are necessary.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Wearable computers like this are truly cool to look at, but they've been out for many years and I can't say I've ever heard of any really successful weraable computers. Perhaps they're too expensive for people to buy, too clumsy, or simply too strange for people to tolerate. What I'd like to know is if anyone has personal experience with one of these wearable computers in the workforce? I'd like to know how they're being used now...
The above was obviously posted by Hemos. Look at "pleasently". I rest my case. He must be getting a smaller cut of the upcoming Andover IPO shares than he wanted... ;-)
----
Morning gray ignites a twisted mass of foreign shapes and sounds
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
How does one use a computer without a keyboard? Clicking icons can only get you so far. -
Check out http://www.brainfingers.com. No need to learn how to use funky keyboard or scare bystanders with voice commands. Just think: /".
"rm -rf
...if this becomes the next "cell-phone?"
How many a-holes will be checking their email from in the cars, or sitting in restaurants with these things hooked up.
How irritating would hearing "You've got mail?" be in a public place?
Someone just needs to develop the killer app for it
Killer app ? Not sure about that, but this is amusing. It's a new slant on putting the personal touch into eCommerce; get a few gargoyles on rollerblades and have them skate around a Paris department store checking out the merchandise for you.
We also have a wearable project here at HP Labs. It's called the predictable, but still cringe-making "BlaserJet".
That is _primitive_. Try http://www.microopticalcorp.com/egdemo.htm. There you get to see a really nice HUD. /projects/wearables/ - the MIT
And if you like wearables, the place to go has to be http://belladonna.media.mit.edu
wearables page. It's full of nutritious wearables information.
Savant
Is it really necessary to say "ick" (or something similar) every time a MS product is mentioned? I think most of the folks visiting Slashdot know enough about software to have our own opinions of, say, Win98. Hopefully, most of us can also see both the bad and the good in such products, and don't need CmdrTaco coaching us.
Bottom line: It's juvenile, and it makes Slashdot look bad.
-- Brian
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
It was more than off the wall, it was humour. Darn, I need a few crates of smileys if I want to make it on Slashdot...
"The wages of sin is death but so is the salary of virtue, and at least the evil get to go home early on Fridays."
Linux could be ported to anything, so it doesn't say much about compatibility to say that Linux runs on a new machine.
What they're saying is that this is a PC, not some totally oddball proprietary thing, so you can run PC-standard software on it.
A monocular display like the one in the story is used by keeping both eyes open. The effect is like having a transparent monitor floating in front of you. You don't get headaches, and you don't have to worry about a laser being beamed directly at you retina (something tells me that no matter how safe such a system would be, you would have a hard time getting consumers to buy into it).
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
The current bottleneck in all the mobile/wearable devices is battery power. Batteries are too heavy and last too short a time. The superslim notebooks -- ones that you can actually carry around -- survive for 2-3 hours at most without an electric outlet. A variety of PDAs can go through the day without recharging, but they all lack decent keyboards and tend to be quite limited in what they do.
Basically, for wearable computers to take off, batteries have to become much lighter.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
How about we have little sensors implanted into the back of our teeth, and we could type with our tongues? Of course eating anything would wreak havoc on the computer, what happened if we accidently chewed a rm -rf /* while logged in as root?
With two states per button, there are 2^3 permutations.
logan
(moderation is masturbation)
ok i know this is annoying, but can linux with a gui be loaded onto this? I would like it, if they would offer perhaps a multi-microdrive package, so i could load linux on it, or some data, ms98 with a 350meg hd leaves about 100 megs to spare.
.sig
matisse:~$ cat
I think consumers wouldn't have too much trouble accepting low-power lasers beamed into their eyes once they realized that it felt fine and doctors gave it a stamp of approval. We bought into the concept of contact lenses quickly enough. Besides, we all sit in front of big electron guns all day (TV's and monitors) and nobody minds that.
Looking for political forums? Check out "The World Forum".
...at least not for a long time. They will be useful, but their application is going to be confined to specialized fields to start. For now, these are not going to be intruding into the Gameboy and Palm Pilot realm.
Where will they be used? howabout
1. Workers in labs, or those around hazardous materials who need a HUD. What about those workes in Japan who created that criticality event by putting too much fissionable material in solution? Keep the important numbers right in front of you all the time.
2. Construction Workers a/o archtiects. Guys working on mega projects who can have an archtitectural overlay of the building plan super-imposed over where they are working right at the moment. Keep those mega-projects on schedule.
3. The obvious medical / dental applications for doctors and surgeons.
As for business applications, there are only 2 places where I can see this taking off soon:
4. Wall Street, where having one of these things with a ticker runnign constantly might provide some use,
5. Agents, (think Jerry McQwire [sic], where you are juggling phones and contracts at the same time.
( by the same token, I could see having assitants on the sidelines at Football games having their playbooks on an eyepiece too. The NFL seems to like their gadgets...)
Anyways, still doubtful this will be aimed at consumers anytime soon, though it will likely be used and oding some important work.
--sugarman--
I didn't know the resolution was only 320x240. Where does it say that?
-- Brian
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
take a look at the cyberlink at http://www.brainfingers.com If that could be integrated with the wearable, you could have a 3D interface - no need for a keyboard, you have a software 'widget' that displays a virtual keyboard, and you think the cursor to the characters you need. Also, if good head position tracking is available, you could have a transparent version of the visor, that could overlay information on to the environment around you ( exact position relative to the data on your environment could be done with gps and some form of inertial tracking - calculating how fast you are moving in what direction from a known point of reference, which could be updated when you are not moving by multiple checks and averages against gps data). I think a situation like an engineer being able to look at a complex circuit or mechanism, and have an overlay of things such as known points of failure on a circuit, or metal fatigue data on a mechanism would be a pretty killer app for this. Also, attach a camera to it, and whenever you meet someone, it could compare the persons image to a history of contacts, identify the individual and display details as an overlay to what you see. A definite case of 'enhanced reality'. Klik Don't fear the future. Build It.
open your mind too much and your brain falls out!
Sony already has a device that fits your description. The PC Glasstron has a flip up shutter for when you want to see where you're heading. Resolution isn't great, but it is 1st generation product after all.
Actually it's the very same technology that MicroOptical uses in their displays. In this case, you're looking at the non-translucent prototype that has been encased in hard plastic for durability. IBM also has a translucent model. Look for the 800x600 color display sometime early next year.
LouZiffer
Wearable computers have been out for a while, in various forms
;-P
Sure wish I could find one..
Someone just needs to develop the killer app for it, something that would give people a reason to actually want to use one on a constant basis.
I'd say first, someone has to SELL an affordable one. The *only* versions I've seen for sale cost upwards of 5,000$ a unit..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
The headset is way too damned clunky... What about the ibm thingy a few months ago that had that tiny slit like display? It was small and not so clunky. The point of a wearable computer is to have a computer you treat like your discman/minidisc player just shove it in your pocket and put it on when you need it... therefore it has to be small and fast to use/put on.
"Runs Win98 (ick)"
The question was posed earlier on the message boards here as to whether or not Win98 is the OS of the future. I do not think this is the case. I would rather propose that the reason this wearable computer runs win98 is this: Obviously there is limited input with any kind of portable/wearable computing systems. The best input to use would be voice recognition (although the earlier story about thought activated computing would be a solution in the [near?] future). At current, such software exists only for Win9x/NT based systems. So /. folks, don't bash the d00dz at IBM for using Win98 at the platform for their wearable prototypes, instead lobby the developers of ViaVoice (also an IBM product) and Dragon NaturallySpeaking to make *nix/BeOS/Other based speech recognition products.
Deitheres
-- .sig files go when they die?
Child: Mommy, where do
Mother: HELL! Straight to hell!
I've never been the same since.
Just like driving a car:
(D) to go forward
(R) to go backward
That commercial was the first thing I thought of when I saw the picture. The computer in the commercial has two major features that will probably need to happen before anyone can make money selling wearable computers. First, the commercial computer is voice controlled. Even simple commands like the ones you see him doing in the commercial are better than giving up a hand to control a ball mouse. Second, people will probably want a see through display. Binocluar vision keeps us from walking into large stationary objects (usually). Nature never intended for us to cover one eye with a computer display. It appeared that the monacle display in the article was opaque, but I might be wrong. The battery life probably isn't that big a deal. People are used to notebook computers with 3 hour battery lives. I don't remember the article mentioning wireless networking, but that's not too difficult to add.
-Barry
000 was not forgotten, it was just not counted, by my way of thinking it's the zeroth configuration.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Anyone seen the http://www.warnervideo.com site yet? Funny. I wonder what they're running on. Oh well, it doesn't matter - watch crock legislation come into effect soon.
You're definatly right about the lack of a good interface and the lack of a killer app. I feel asthetics needs to enter into the mix as well when considering wearable computing. Right now they're big and kind of wierd looking. People don't want to look like a freak. (Of course this is the very thing people said about the walkman when it was introduced 20 years ago.)
As killer apps go, I'm a big fan of augmen ted reality and remembe rance agents. This could be the killer app once the technology improves.
Now for my spiel on interfaces. Each computing device, whether it's desktops, PDS, or wearables are used in fundamentally different ways. For a desktop, the desktop-document metaphore works because it's primarly used for "desk work". But for a PDA it doesn't make sense. That's why WinCE failed. People use a PDA like a notepad so a notepadesque interface is the best (like PalmOS). Same thing goes for wearables. People aren't looking for wearables to replace desktops any more than people looked for PDAs to replace desktops. Therefore a new interface needs to be developed. Personally I'd like to see something like the interface used in ohnny Mnemonic. You just need finger/head tracking. No real devices. That's the interface I think people want to use.
The twiddler is the cheapest and best way of chording for use with wearables. If you're really interested, do a search on Steven Mann's projects. He's the honorary godfather of wearables.
Useful info above.
I totally screwed that calculation up. That will teach me to speak before I'm awake. ;)
;)
It should be 43.8 Hours. I wasn't paying attention to the units.
Well, X really sucks at resolutions that low... but running Linux with a CLI on a portable would rule, and the indicated resolution is fine for a 80x25 text screen.
Anyone who has watched Red Green knows that the keyboard is no problem. (grin)
LOL! Someone moderate this up! ...dreaded blue eye of death indeed....
Cliff Palmer, Jr.
-Julius X
remove "-whatkindofspamdoyoutakemefor-" from email to send
what happens when you try to overclock? fry yourself?
Insert mind here.
And you only ever need 3 buttons in 'doze anyway -- as long as they've got CTRL-ALT-DELETE covered, that should be all you ever need.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
So this is kind of long, but i'm trying to get a lot of background information accross... The subject sums up my point pretty well.
years and years ago when I was an undergrad at CMU, I did software design for wearable computers.
To the best of my knowledge wearables started out as darpa/NSF funded University research projects, with the main two centers being CMU EDRC and MIT Media Lab. Having worked at one and seen lectures by the other, the MIT boys seem to be driven by how much oompf you can put into a box and the effects of living with/in one on life, and the CMU boys are driven by industrial mission specific design. Both are valid and necessary areas of research.
I am not an expert in the field, nor do I claim to be. I do, however, have more experience with it than 99% of the population.
The key job of the wearable computer is, and always will be information access.
Will someone find a way to run quake 5 on one? Probably. But that is a secondary or tertiary concern.
The largest problem facing the wearable is the physical user interface. Everyone seems to be tossing faster hardware and more software against the usability problem, and I feel this is the incorrect approach. The OS really does not matter at all.
In my opinion the correct process should be: Industrial Design and then GUI.
I am completely unimpressed with IBM wearable. Why? I saw essentially the same interface on the Vu-Man 1 at CMU in 1993.
One of the best designs that I have seen was the Vuman-2r and 3 (which I coded for), which involved three buttons spaced around a large dial. The idea was you used the buttons to select, and the dial to scroll through information and select options to further direct your search. The dial was big, designed so that it could still be used if you were wearing work gloves and the wearble was *inside* the side cargo pocket found on miltary fatigues. The ID guys came up with the design, the software guys were left out of the process becuase they couldn't think outside the box.
The software was then designed around these capabilities. And it worked. form design, interface and software were designed from the ground up for the specific tasks and environment where the wearable would excell.
According to a work aquantance of mine, comdex the info kiosks were apparently run by people with wearables. He is convinced that he could have found information faster in a book, than by asking the wearable info centers.
Voice recognition seems to be the holy grail of wearable interfaces, but people seem to spend more time on it than on the industrial design of the box. A good physical interface will always be faster and cheaper than voice recognition. If it were not, then why do we still have hot keys so many years after the mouse was debuted?
IBM has a commerical out with a guy sitting in a public square in europe trading stocks and navigating through excel using voice recognition. Apparently he does quite well in the market that day. I wish I could have been sitting next to him so I could hear exactly what his personal private business was.
"You want to kiss the sky? Better learn how to kneel." - U2
"It was like trying to herd cats..." - Robert A. Heinlein
Sig:
Barbeque is a noun. Not a verb.
wtf you biased losers, why is it a bad thing if Windows 98 is run on the computer? That'll just make it easier for it to get widespread use (no standard consumer would buy an extravagant thing like an eyepiece computer if it ran a text prompt OS), when wearable computers are settled in then you can bitch about WinWhatever being run on them, for now just live with it.
Still some problems with the whole concept of the wearable.
1. User interface. So you have a screen that allow the computer to talk to you, but the ability to talk to the computer is still limited. OK there is voice recognition but it is still limited. Then there is touch pads that are mounted were ever on your body that does not interfere and can be kept out of the way.
If you limited the user inputs to just pointer clicks, the keypad is eliminated and that does clear up some of the hardware needed. Whatever app you are running then needs to have optimized to point, click, and shoot.
2. Borging the human. Cables between the battery pack-system-display-the user interface... that keep getting wrapped around you and getting in the way. Wait till you start walking and one of your cables latches onto the handrail on a stair... Ouch.
3. Just plain Ergonomics. Anytime you put something in front of you face, your attention will be drawn to it. The whole idea of it is to allow the person to move and not be tethered. Fact, most people can not chew gum and walk at the same time. Now imagine a screen that is putting some type of information while walking around. Just one brief glimpse to the screen and the person walks into something because their attention was momentarily is distracted, walks into something and trips and hurts himself. We have problems with cell phones and cars? Wait tills some idiot starts playing quake on the highway.
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I have problems with people who wear a walkman. They are oblivious to the world and are only using one of their senses. With this they are going to be zombie.
i didn't know i had that on. i think this'll fix it.
"There is no spoon."
After all, it is running win98 ;-)
I would expect the laser/retina trick to be more effective. I've never managed to superimpose one image on another by putting one in front of each of my eyes. And superimposing is pretty important (for me at least) because it would let me get my computer to recognize people for me to compensate for my face blindness.
The shareholder is always right.
How SETI works is that your client processes one packet at a time. What is proposed with the Beowulf, is that the single packet is distributed amongst the wearables so that the packet is processed by all wearables at the same but shorter time.
Consultancy: If you're not part of the solution, there's money to be made in prolonging the problem
Well, there's a commercial version made by MicroOptical Corp: http://www.microopticalcorp.com/
Sadly not yet in general production...
Now what if that wacky neurocomputing was used in conjunction with that wearable PC ? :)
Anyone look at this and think of the Borg?
Any number of permutations is possible - :-)
Think Nicolas Cage in that helicoptor movie. They spend a whole bunch of time getting him to get information from a monacle.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
What moron moderated up that brainless piece of Windows-bashing? I demand a visible log of who moderated what.
As soon as this little baby comes out, I'll be making a quick Linux port. And then I'll invest a few days hacking together a Head Up Display style window manager, complete with luminous green target sights and optical tracking systems.
And thus I will earn immortal fame for being the one to unleash upon the streets of the world a plague of geeks pretending to be The Terminator.
Apparently, Steve has a display built into a pair of wire-frame bi-focals. I haven't actually seen it, as it is somewhat fragile (bond wires as structural elements!), but it is supposed to be rather inconspicuous.
I can't seem to find a link to the paper that describes it; however, it should be at http://wearcam.org
I do some work with Steve at the Wearable Computing lab. Very cool stuff -- the site above has quite a bit of material on both the technology and math of wearable computing, personal imaging, and so forth.
well... the mac only has one button, and you can do a variety of things. like single click, double click, hold a button down...
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hmmm
Wearable computers AND neuro computers on slashdot at the same time?
perhaps they wont need a keyboard afterall.
I'm launching a company based on Wearable computers. Your help will be appreciated.
You can help shape a product that will be designed as Open Source, Easily cusomizeable (sp?), available before Christmas this year, and open to any OS you choose.
I won't lie to you and say that I don't want a profit (we all gotta live), but I WILL make a number of accomodations based on comments from , and discounts available to the slashdot community.
Five people who participate in this questionnaire, may be chosen (by me) to try my wearable for one month for free.
Questionnaire
_______________________________
I'm pretty sure this guy was joking. Lighten up.
I am not sure if the device they show allows the same thing, but the Forte CyberPuck has three buttons and a tilt sensor, for use as a "baseless" joystick. It is fully analog, so you can have a complete range of values for X/Y axis control - the three buttons are standard joystick buttons (the thing plugs into the joystick port).
The are similar devices also available that look like baseless "pistol-grip" joysticks - that may/may not have more buttons. These devices work pretty well for navigating in standard 3D games (Doom, Quake) - but they might be a pain for anything else (true 6DOF games, or a desktop style environment) - but they should work ok for menu style selection...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
if you read the specs, you'll see it is a see- through display...
Roland
"The new wave is not value-added; it's garbage-subtracted" - Esther Dyson, Dec 1994
What's sad is that there's someone out there with money to burn who actually buys crap like this. (Or they're uninformed enough to believe that overpriced items like Bose Wave Radio are actually worth their price.)
I have one for you that has:
Tell me what else you need here
See my first offerings on Ebay and GO auctions.
I'm doing research, to sell wearables that are open source, customizeable, cheap, and available before Christmas '99. (this week, to be exact!) Look at the questionnaire and tell me what you think!
Also, five people who participate in this questionnaire, may be chosen (by me) to try my wearable for one month for free.
_______________________________
The battery life outlasts the average run time.
"oh no, the dreaded blue eye of death"
Now if this had the ability to either overlay what you see (by back projecting the image directly onto your eyeball) or if it had a small webcam that was constantly setting the background to be what you would have seen anyways, man, I'd have one attached permanently.
I don't care if it runs 98 or linux... as long as I can have one or two.
-- Without fear or favor --
Man I would love to set up a Beowulf cluster of these. Say it has IR networking technology. If you have a sufficiently large group of people wearing these things you could burn through SETI data in about 30 seconds. ::drools at the thought of 50000 people at a baseball game putting their wearables into standby/share-cycles mode and detecting 15 alien civilizations while the Yankees win another one::
---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!
I mean, especially since it runs Win98, it means you won't have enough time to install the darn thing...
"The wages of sin is death but so is the salary of virtue, and at least the evil get to go home early on Fridays."
That device is interesting.
But there's something else that I am looking for - a small, very light portable box that includes standard PC hardware, but that is not a laptop.
It should be just a little box with connectors for keyboard, screen, mouse, network, period.
Why? Well, for one, whereever I go, keyboards, screens and mice are already there. Also, most laptops make a lot of compromises for the sake of including everything in one box. Yet, a "normal" PC, even one in a portable case, is not light or portable enough.
Does anyone know where to find such a box?
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You may like my a cappella music
Well shave my legs and call me grand-dad.. i just saw a wearable how-to at /etc: GeekTV and well.. it looks almost the same.. woohoo!
The MIT Technology Review (May-June 99 issue) covered systems like this, although from the photo it would appear that Olympus/IBM have reduced the form factor still more. The magazine has an article about Steve Mann's work on wearable computers.
:)
Steve's gear is actually built into his clothing and displayed via a pair of heavy glasses. He makes use of wireless networking where-ever he goes so his computer can assist him with info, etc (even to the point of setting up his own transmitters, etc if he's in a convention). With the aid of his system, he can appear to know about almost any topic. Fascinating stuff that's really taking you into Gargoyle land...
The system referred to in the BBC article is still a little too obtrusive/clunky for my liking. Much better than the old Compaq "Portable" that was my first mobile, however
I left my body to science, but I'm afraid they've turned it down...
I think something like this would be far more useful if it had a connection to the internet, or some other form of built in communication. This would be extremely useful in situations where access to information was a must, but carrying around a laptop would be too much burden. For example, military uses for small units such as the SEALs, search and rescue in hostile environments, and eventually manned missions to other planets. However, I doubt it will ever reach more than a 'toy status' for geeks in the consumer market.
I'm worried about this. Three buttons, in all permutations can only create 6 actions, which is just enough for a 2-buttoned mouse.
I wonder if it can handle the Twiddler. Then you wouldn't need a keyboard that they plan to develop for it in the future.
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"I used to live in Real Life(TM), now I live in my computer"
a great input method might be to use a graffiti-like system with the pad on a watch or something on your arm. That would give you the hands-free action of a wearable and the input versatility of a Palm.
I'm not sure if this is the company you spoke of, but the technology sounds a lot like that of Microvision, which happens to be Seattle-based.
http://www.mvis.com/
These guys are researching and producing what they call "Virtual Retinal Displays" which project the image directly onto the retina using a low-power laser. I've seen claims that this technology will eventually produce resolutions unlike anything you've seen in conventional displays.
Some other big advantages: The product can be used as a heads-up display (transparent) and the laser-based displays are daylight readable. IBM's TV commercial shows a guy using the display on a park bench, but the small amount of literature I've read from IBM suggests that the display is NOT daylight-readable. Yick! I hope that's not true. As someone pointed out in an earlier post, the display in the commercial also looks nothing like the clunky device that is pictured in the one you've already seen in the news article here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid _538000/538072.stm
Microvision appears to be primarily targeting the high-margin markets right now, specifically military, avionics (virtual cockpit), and medical tech. I hope they eventually create a low-cost consumer model based on the same technology. Maybe the current, rather clunky displays from IBM and others will help build the market segment to a volume that makes it possible.
Oh, and will people be willing to use it? Some will be scared to at first, just like some people were afraid to cook with microwave ovens during their introduction. 'nuff said.
On a different note, keep in mind that wearables are not intended to replace desktops. They are intended, like palm organizers, to be used when you can't use a desktop. Coupled with a high-speed portable/wireless internet connection they could make information access a whole lot nicer for some mobile users. Getting a few lines displayed on your web-enabled phone is fine, but if you want to read large documents, I'd prefer the hi-res wearable. If it's made small enough to integrate into the pair of corrective glasses I already wear and if I can afford to actually buy one, then I'll be in heaven.
The interface doesn't have to be as good as the desktop. It might not be useful for what you want to do with it (everything), but it is good enough, even with the existing interfaces, for many tasks. Comparing wearables to desktops is like comparing PDAs to desktops or mice to voice recognition. It shouldn't be done. Remember: think supplement, not replacement.
Perhaps one of those nifty (wireless, perhaps?) controllers with a left and right button that bases motion on tilt? IE a gyroscopic sort of system wherein the pointer motion is controlled by pitch. This technology exist in remote controls; has anybody seen it?
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THIS IS PRE-ALPHA PRIVATE RELEASE CODE!!!
DO NOT USE IT UNLESS YOU ARE A DEVELOPER.
ALL IT DOES IS CRASH!
THIS IS PRE-ALPHA PRIVATE RELEASE CODE!!!
DO NOT USE IT UNLESS YOU ARE A DEVELOPER.
ALL IT DOES IS CRAS
Sure beats the heck out of my first "Portable" computer...
Apple2c
Well, it looks like we have a use for that neural interface technology that the doctor doesn't want us to have.
Being able to move a phantom finger over a phantom keyboard sounds pretty useful here, I wonder if you could do better. I know I have some neurons that are wired to touch-type, could we learn how to do the same sort of thing, without the fingers, and stuff? I'd be pretty happy if I could use my brain as a fast keyboard.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
oh, look! This looks like a Tiger (the guys who made all those hand-held, not-quite-up-to-gameboy-standards games for 10 bucks) R-Zone, with a better screen, and, well, everything. hmmmm... methinks i could slap a pentium on that R-Zone i got. off topic a bit, but i like this: Cats from mars! hilarious!
"There is no spoon."
Erm, isn't Linux a variation on Unix, and if so, don't you need to write the OS/software to run on the machine? Wouldn't that mean you'd have to buy one of these things and pick it apart to find out how to run *nix on it? Btw: Mac OS 9 is grossly unstable on my PowerBook G3 (bronze keyboard). Any insight? I think Linux is the way to go...
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gorby out
"There is no spoon."
The start menu takes up about 1/4 of the screen. Icons are huge. Nothing is useable.
When you have a screen that small, you need to be very effecient with screen space. Windows is not effecient at all. Among other things, this is one reason why Windows does not work well for a small screen. Look at Windows CE devices for a good example.
Got HTML? Want LaTeX? Try html2latex
The displays always have crappy resolution AND are super expensive. If someone would start selling a 640x480x8bpp head mounted display for under $200, we'd be cooking with gas..
I saw that add too. We all should have seen it since it was on durring or right at the end of The X-Files. I almost missed it (reading mail on my PalmPilot) because at first it was just some guy screaming at the pigeons. It was an IBM add right? Anyway, the device in the add looked a heck-of-a-lot better than the pictures on the IBMjapan site. The monical was really tiny and translucent. Gimme gimme gimme. Rather than a mouse and win98, how about a twiddler and Linux?
-=-=-=-=- osjedi uses Debian GNU/Linux. -=-=-=-=-
I saw the same add myself and was a bit disapointed when I saw the headset in the article, but other articles have mentioned that there are SIX working prototypes, and pics of them all had a diferent headset, kinda like the one on fox
I was hoping this would be what I saw an ad for last night on FOX. They didn't show the box but it had a much cooler looking headset, kinda looked like it had a crystal on the end of a telephone headset. I don't even know if this was a real product or just a "see we have a cool idea" type thing. The head set on the one in the article looks like it covers too much of your face, and whats with the 10 inch thing? 10 inches at what distance? dont the I-Glasses simulate much bigger than that already.
In any case I can't wait, much less invasive than the wetware that came in earlier today
Travis
Extremism in the cause of liberty is no vice, Moderation in the cause of freedom is no virtue. --B.Goldwater
IBM's page on the wearable is at http://www.jp.ibm.com/esbu/E/wpc/index. html.
Notably, it uses a 233MHz MMX Pentium, uses 64MB RAM, has a 340MB disk, NeoMagic 128XD video chip set, and the screen resolution is 320x240 (with a note that the SVGA version is under development).
Has anyone seen the IBM commercial with the guy using one of these with voice control and wireless connection? -- very neat!
That's the eyepiece. Frankly, the idea of a wearable computer doesn't thrill me all that much--as it stands, I try to avoid using my mouse as much as I can, and a computer without a keyboard strikes me as just useless. Give a wearable computer a keyboard, and you'uve suddenly got a laptop with a strap.
Have we finally got a truly viable eyepiece as output device? If so, that's the part I like. The savings in battery usage on a laptop would be significant, dual eyepieces provide 3d (of course)...if they're good enough, I might even consider using one on my desktop.
I'd certainly consider them if they could be made of transparent plastic and switchable (so I could look through them as needed.)
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
Too bad they didn't have the balls to make a chord keyboard. Time to whip out the pic and make one myself...
Ryan
From the MP3 jukebox company also mentioned today comes the Y2PC
Haven't seen one, but it is exactly what you are asking for. Not as small or light as i would hope, but... no integral display! Only downside that I see with it is there is only one PS2 port, so your mouse would need to be USB.
Have a look at Advantech's website and you'll figure out that you don't have to be a rocket scientist to build one yourself.
Wearable computers are cool, that one fine day people'd walking around with their jacket being the webserver, fileserver or even the chatserver. Fiddle with FreeBSD or Linux to run on those things for all that... and Win(s) just won't be able to do it (economically).
rgds,
~keylock
Don't forget that the military has been using displays of this type for awhile. One example is the use of monocle displays for flying a night. Information from radar and IR sensors is overlayed on the pilot's vision by the monocle.
The future is going to be dictated by two things, software and interface. The biggest reason wearable computers aren't "human efficient" yet are the interfaces. The point of wearables is lost if you have to break out a keyboard in order to enter data, or need a flat surface to run your mouse on. The pistol grip mouse controller this new machine has is a step forward, but the lack of random character input hinders its usefulness. There are TV ads for wearables that are voice-controlled, but these interfaces are not optimal due to the simple fact that people sitting next to you on the bus simply do not want to hear you controlling your computer.
There exist some palm-held keyboards that work on a chording principle, I believe some of the gargoyle cyborgs at the MIT Media Lab use these; with only five buttons, you can chord together all the keys on a keyboard. The major problem with this reaching mainstream is that it is a completely different mechanism that would have be learned & practiced. There were some ergonomic keyboards that took advantage of the chording concept (to prevent having to move your fingers all over the place), but these didn't take off for much the same reason.
What, then, is going to drive the industry towards wearables? IMHO, it's software. People were apparently willing to learn the Graffiti system for the Palm because that line of PDAs provided the right kinds of software in a very portable fashion. The software was mostly read-only, data entry is not its strong point, but neither was it intended to be. That's the kind of thing that a wearable computer could be useful for -- the keyboard isn't so necessary if all you're doing is displaying data.
Of course, you don't need a Pentium to display data! Which means a heads-up Visor (hmm... fate? ;) could just as easily be the next big thing. As well, perhaps it's not the machine we should be impressed with, so much as the headset -- I can think of many more uses for a head-mounted, your-eyes-only, just-like-a-monitor display, even with conventional laptops -- on a plane, bus, train, for security reasons and/or for space limitations.
I love the idea of wearable computers. Someone just needs to develop the killer app for it, something that would give people a reason to actually want to use one on a constant basis.
--
If it's not important, you can probably find it in...
If it's not important, you can probably find it in...
Project Galactic Guide (
I am a true believer in the wearable PC. Consider what a technologically interested person might carry on him when he leaves the house nowerdays:
- Mobile phone. Complete with email gateway-ed messaging, and possibly wap based web surfing.
- PDA with a good interface and a bunch of flexible applications
- Portable mp3 player with multimedia capacity and as much as 100 mb (or 4.8 gigs for that new Compaq one) of memory space.
- Gameboy for that much needed Tetris fix.
And more are on the way, such as city navigating GPS units, those digital book readers, etc etc. Can one possibly imaging these things NOT going to converg?
What is important to me though is that it is truly a wearable PC. I don't want an extended mobile phone with a bunch of embedded services, but a computer on my person that gives me as much freedom as my computer at home (and yes that means Linux). I don't want to put myself in the hands of hardware makers and other making programs that serve there interest. For example, the new GRPS (packet data over GSM) enabled phones here will be crippled to not allow voice data over ip/grps, since that would be cheaper than using the GSM service per minute fees. And the hardware music players will start limiting what songs I can play by obeying the SDMI iniative.
If someone could combine the virtual freedom of the PC with the physical freedom of a wearable device, that would be a true killer. Go get rich somebody.
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
This is cool technology alright. However I do not see what the big fuss is all about. It offers nothing new within ground breaking technology and the idea with wearable PC is old news. In order to create a market it should offer a comfortable user interface suitable for wearing. A keyboard might be nice - but is that best suited when walking? What happens when people jump around and look at the small monitor? Is it disturbing? Advanced speech recognition, tracking head/eye movements and using laser to display images directly on to the eye are technologies that should be considered further for this kind of equipment...
Another thought - those companies who produce the mini laptops shouldn't have a problem coming something equally good - possibly better - if the competition requires.
A much better approach is VR glasses which scan weak laserbeams directly onto your retina. The University of Washington has been working on this and have achieved 1280x760 resolution. I recall that another company had a working demo of this at least three years which they showed off at a major trade show, but I can't remember who they are (can anyone else?). Not only could this technology provide fully immersive VR, but if parts of the glasses' view area are transparent, then we could see our apps floating in front of us. Imagine walking around all day with your cool shades, seeing a stock ticker scroll by...
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