> 1. How much will it cost to build a wearable?
Varies - it's however much you want to spend. I myself haven't finished
mine yet, so I'm not really sure. A good price point is probably $2000 - am
I right guys?
> 2. What kind of display gives a good compromise between cost and resolution?
A list of a whole bunch of displays and reviews is available at
http://genesis.eecg.toronto.edu/head-mounted-displays.html
The only problem I see - most of them aren't for sale, are very hard to
find, and don't have any prices listed. Hey Professor Mann, do you have any
current advice on displays for those of us trying to find one for a new
wearable? Everything either seems to be "in development," really expensive
($4000? that's more than a computer!) or no longer being made. I really
don't have the engineering experience to make my own HMD - where can I find
one?
> 3. What's the most common input device for wearables, and how does it work?
The best input device is the Twiddler by Handykey (http://www.handykey.com)
$199 It is a 1 handed chording keyboard, really cool!
> 4. Aren't hard drives kind of ... expensive? ;)
Hard drives are probably one of the cheaper components of wearables. The
PC/104 boards and power supplies and NTSC to VGA converters and batteries
and HMDs and Twiddlers etc. all cost more.
BTW, I appreciate any advice I can get as a high-school student with no
engineering background trying to make one of these things. Any one who has
some extra time on their hands - prices and contact info for vendors is most
appreciated.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
"To live is to suffer. To survive, well, that's to find
meaning in the suffering." - DHX
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Danny Silverman | Terrestrial Concepts Web Design
| http://connections.dhs.org
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Southern California, United States of America, Earth, Milky Way
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----------
>From: "Thor Harald Johansen" <
>
>To: <
>
>Subject: Curiosity will hopefully not kill the cat
>Date: Sat, May 22, 1999, 2:37 AM
>
> Hi!
>
> I saw this TV program about wearable computers, and I got interested. A time
> after I saw it, I decided to build a hand-held keyboard. I found out about
> some signal pins on the paralell port, and I thought: "Why can't I just run
> one of the output pins through five keys from a broken keyboard, and back to
> those signal pins, then code a program to read'em?". Well, I did so, without
> any real good equipment. The "paddle" was created with a aliminium foil
> core, a roll of tape, five key switches, a soldering iron, and a few wires
> from a Nintendo paddle I had lying around. I was able to write things with
> the keyboard, using binary combinations, where one finger was one bit, but
> the human anatomy makes it difficult to do certain combinations, so the
> project was technically successful, but not practically.
>
> Some time later I had forgotten all about my little "invention", when I read
> an article about new user interfaces, and that desktop environments may not
> be future of computers. The article was interesting, and I found a few links
> to MIT pages about wearables, and I got my interest back. I've been
> searching around the net for more information, but it seems that most of it
> is outdated. I've heard about PC/104, WearComp ++, but I'm unsure of a few
> things:
>
> 1. How much will it cost to build a wearable?
> 2. What kind of display gives a good compromise between cost and resolution?
> 3. What's the most common input device for wearables, and how does it work?
> 4. Aren't hard drives kind of ... expensive? ;)
>
> Well, that's all I have to ask for this time. I hope someone will be able to
> answer. :)
> --
> Thor Harald Johansen
>
>
> --
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