Brian Kuriyama wrote: > What specifically do people want to satisfy their wearable computing > needs? If we aren't specific enough, how will we know when we've > reached "wearable device nirvana"? It sounds like you understand the problem perfectly. :) You make two very specific points that I'd like to follow up on: First, you're right that there's tons of technology out there right now, and much of it is adequate. A little compromise, a little accepting of a device's limitations, a little hacking and tweaking and you can probably get something together that's relatively decent, and maybe even get things done a little better. Modern smartphones and PDAs go a long way in doing everything halfway well. But I'm not satisfied with "good enough." Look at your PDA/phone/computer syncing example. From a hardware perspective, there's no reason all three couldn't cross-sync with each other, and no reason an online calendar couldn't allow friends and family to see when you're available and make their own appointments to see you (with your approval, of course). But they can't. You say yourself you can't have all the same information and all your contacts on your phone. Why not? This is an artificial limitation created by the software and hardware manufacturers for marketing reasons, for political reasons, for business reasons, etc. I want all my devices to talk to each other, to share the same information, to stay updated if that information changes, and to react intelligently (either merging or asking) if there's a conflict. I can do that right now... if I write the software myself to do it for each device. Same with you and your "cyborg" hardware. It might all be useful if only you could hack each device just a little... Other issues include basic usability: navigating through drop-down and pull-out menus on a handheld is not as efficient as big stable icons. Folders are not efficient when your data types on a handheld are limited. Lots of smartphone and PDA UI comes over wholesale from the desktop, when the original Palm hardware and software demonstrated that something substantially different was better, even necessary. Second, you say that no-one is talking in specifics about what they want to do, how they want things to work. You're right, here, too. But what people say they want are not the same things as what they will actually use/do/put up with. This is true for most things, not just technology. Thinking about it is not the same as using something every day and finding all the little problems with it, fixing them, and then repeating that process. This is why I asked for the next Jeff Hawkins. The story goes that he walked around with a block of wood to simulate the size and weight of a PDA, drew UIs on paper stuck to it and pretended to use them, day in and day out, to figure out what needed to be done and how to do it best. Prior efforts for handhelds and pen-based computing were very different, much larger, much more complicated, designed as desktop replacements, and were failures as a result. The Palm changed all that, but there hasn't been a really good followup. There's no Palm or Jeff Hawkins for the next revolutionary device. I believe that what people need from wearable and ubiquitous computing is substantially different than the evolutionary devices we're getting now, these music playing phone calling personal organizing hybrids. I think it'll take someone thinking about it from scratch, without looking at desktops and PDAs and phones, but starting over from a pad of paper and dayplanner and a rotary dial phone and a rolodex and saying, "Okay, now how can I make this better?" This is why you can't get specific about it. You're trying to do something new and better and just tweaking an existing modal UI isn't going to cut it. Thanks, Vitorio Miliano _______________________________________________ Wear-Hard mailing listhttp://www.haven.org/mailman/listinfo/wear-hard
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