Wearable Computing For The Masses

As a reader of igargoyle, do you identify with cyborgs? Transhumanists? Hardware enthusiasts? Something else?

Vitorio Miliano answered this question with a very thoughtful answer that both questions my initial question, and also addresses wearable computing for the masses:

"Busy." "Overworked." "Forgetful." "Human."

I see wearables and ubiquitous computing in general as a solution for time management, information storage and a way to eliminate the modern workplace need for continuous partial attention, and to be able to go back to giving 100% of our attention to the task at hand by having the computer dictate what that task needs to be.

Mediated reality, digital autoassociative memories, it seems to me that all of this is being toyed with for the sake of toying. There are no serious efforts being made to produce something usable by the mass market, nothing that will take all our inputs during the day, email, news feeds, TV, IMs, schedules, appointments, interrupting coworkers,
family responsibilities, and filter out everything we either don't want to deal with or shouldn't be dealing with or can better deal with at another time.

There's no Jeff Hawkins for wearable/ubiquitous computing. There's no-one who is walking around with a block of wood strapped to their back and face figuring out the best way a single mom middle manager with two kids is going to most effectively use a device that can orchestrate her entire day for her if she would only trust it.

There's no-one taking those use cases and building a multimodal UI that's consistent and efficient and effective and unobtrusive, because having a high resolution HMD so you can run Microsoft Word isn't going to be the way this sort of technology is going to take off. Input must be passive and hands-free unless it's a pointed moment in time, such as interrupting a conversation to say "computer" or pulling out a touchpad so you can write in Graffiti or on a Blackberry-style chiclet keyboard.

Ubiquitous computing needs wearable computing to happen because of the bandwidth problem. The world will never be saturated with multi-megabit wireless bandwidth, and once you come to trust your computer, not having
it available because you're in between cell towers is not going to be pleasant: it's going to be disorienting. Storage and processing capacity will always beat bandwidth in availability. You'll store more information on you, not in the cloud, as time moves forward, so you need ways to ubiquitously present your information, from a behind-the-bathroom-mirror screen to the seatback touchscreen on an airplane to the stereo in your car. Only the work done with multimodal wearable UIs will support that.

The PalmPilot wasn't created to replace the desktop, just to replace a pad of paper. Modern handhelds and phones have forgotten that. Wearables still haven't figured it out. Hardware is essentially a solved problem, has been for years. Physical design and multimodal UI design for mass market appeal and everyday use isn't. No-one's even
started on it, because those that could be are already sitting in front of a high-resolution multi-processor desktop ten hours a day.

I sold off my wearable prototyping hardware because messing with it was a distraction from the real work in this that needs to be done: the user interfaces. A multimodal UI obviously includes a desktop component, because workstations will never go away, so nothing is stopping me from getting started right now besides my own false preconceptions.

All the pieces to accomplish this are out there, right now, today. They have been for years. Will the next Jeff Hawkins please stand up?

[ via the Wear-Hard mailing list ]