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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.
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".
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.
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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!
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.
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If it's not important, you can probably find it in...
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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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