Hi friar wrote: > What are your plans business-wise for wearable computing? > Are you mostly researching for marketable ideas, or do you > have a "real product" already in mind? Good question. There are always two paths going on in my wearable travels. The first path is pure research, trying to push the envelope in mobile systems and alternative interfaces. What this ends up being is a never ending quest of building and scrapping and refinement. I will always have a personal wearable in development that will not be targeted for marketability. The other path kind of feeds off the first, how can I take the lessons learned from the building and scrapping and make them into products? I'm smart enough to know that I can't compete with IBM or Toshiba or even Xybernaut for that matter. My target audience is not joe consumer and is not power wearable geek either. I want to make some powerful systems for disabled people. I don't want to do this to get rich, I want to do it to help people, because I have the skills to do it, and people need the tech. The same reason that these folks do it, high tech with a heart. http://www.share.umassd.edu/ http://www.share.umassd.edu/share/clients/clients.htm I am very displeased with the cost of systems for blind people and people with poor motor skills. I bought a keyboard for $450 that is for people who can't type on normal keyboards, it's probably worth $70. The cost of speech synthesizers, braille keyboards, and all kinds of alternative devices are sickeningly expensive. In my opinion people are taking advantage of this market, and I think it's flat out wrong to do that. > It seems to me that most of the wearable companies currently are > devoted to building hardware (most of which is out of date by > the time they get it to market) without really having any truely > "wearable" software. Bingo. I'm a software guy, an applications guy from way back, been programming for 25 years. It is a lot of fun to build wearable hardware, and it's really easy to get distracted by that. But a desktop in a small box is still not really a wearable IMO. Also, it's really hard to compete on hardware, especially with companies like Advantech and other who are doing high volume and therefore able to offer some very competitive pricing. I have no intention of building hardware, at least not core hardware. I will try to work out partnerships with some of the hardware vendors, and my focus will mostly be on software. I do plan to develop some hardware, but it will all be peripherals, mostly oriented around alternative interfaces: special keyboards, braille keyboards, switch and joystick type inputs, alternative displays, etc. In parallel with this I want to do research on biofeebdack interfaces which could potentially become products some day but will be research for the foreseeable future. > I dislike the term "killer app" but that is what I'm thinking > is the real opportunity for wearable machines. Yes, software is where the future of wearables lies. I want to nix the idea of desktop and palmtop comletely and come up with something new. This will take some time, probably a couple of years just to have a solid foundation. Right now I am trying to take inventory of the important things people need to do, evaluating existing products/tools, looking for ways to improve them. I want to speak to a bunch of people who depend on voice systems and do some surveys, find out what works and doesn't, what they wish they had but don't. After a good foundation of software is written, the idea will be to grab existing hardware for the core, and I want to do some really agressive pricing, so blind people can get a whole computer loaded with software for the same price that it costs for a braille keyboard. Pricing agreesively won't make me rich, but I learned in silly-con valley that money doesn't buy happiness, heart does, and that's precisely why the target is for people who need help. One other thing: I will not provide tech for military purposes, not now, not ever, I just can't support that, even for huge dollars. > In two or three years, I expect the hardware speed and wireless > networking infrastructure will finally be at the point to support > "everyday" wearables for the business crowd. And the software > development time will take about that long to build. I think that hardware speed is already there, pricing is getting really reasonable, but the wireless is still immature. However, my target audience is not so concerned with wireless, they will be happy to have a better way to just do email, browse the web, read books, play games, listen to music, take notes, and many other things that most of us take for granted. Check out some of these ... http://www.augcominc.com/links.html#org http://www.vard.org/jour/00/37/1/barre371.htm http://www.csun.edu/cod/94virt/wec~1.html http://www.csun.edu/cod/conf2001/proceedings/0107junker.html http://www.ee.cua.edu/~chaos/people/adrian/research/pads/resna_00.htm http://rehab-www.eng.cam.ac.uk/papers/lsk12/cm96/isaac.htm http://rjcooper.com/trackir/index.html http://www.rdrehab.dk/index.asp?Id=73 http://www.diku.dk/~panic/eyegaze/article.html http://rjcooper.com/cross-scanner/index.html http://www.pathwaysdg.com/prods.htm http://www.csun.edu/cod/93virt/UID~1.html http://www.rz.rwth-aachen.de/vr/papers/BiolMed95.pdf http://www.llu.edu/info/legacy/Legacy9.html http://www.medibolt.com/Technology.html http://www.pulsar.org/2k/neattools/about/ And this is a great list of alternative input technologies http://billbuxton.com/inputSources.html My key philosophy is life is: we keep what we have by giving it away. Namaste, Doug -- Subscription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with subject of "subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" toWear-Hard Mailing List Archive (searchable): http://wearables.blu.org Please, *PLEASE* don't subscribe through a forward/expander/false domain
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