Reading a review of the iWatch OS3 by Walt Mossberg (this guy is awesome!), I was reminded of how computers will be worn in the future, and in some ways they already are (smartphones, bluetooth ear buds, smart watches)
Watching the video teardown of the new iWatch Series 2 reveals a tiny ~1wh battery! No wonder it has 1 day of battery life. So batteries are going to have to improve a lot in order to make wearable tech more plausible for normal people!
Look at what Apple did with batteries in their new AirPods! Interesting approach with the charging storage case, I saw Motorola do that trick with the "hint" bluetooth ear piece.
Wireless earbuds are the wearable tech rage of today, pair them to your smartphone and you can appear to be schizophrenic as people look on as you have a conversation with someone who is nowhere near you, your phone hidden in your clothes :P
Wearable tech has to be rigorously power optimized to give user pleasing battery life. Consider what Fibit was forced to do in order to give the Surge 3-5 days of run time per charge, an elaborate amount of fine grain C++ size optimized software and power sipping sunlight readable inverted B&W LCD touch screen!
The Apple Watch takes a more tank like approach, jamming a 1000nit OLED with a beefy little battery inside the head unit, a more powerful SOC, and GPS, thats waterproof to 50m with built in inductive charging. The series 2 Apple watch packs a lot of tech, but that comes in at a $369 price!
Super Suit : Sci-fi Example
Kiera Cameron, a fictional character in this Canadian Sci-fi series called "Continuum" wears a really cool smart suit that interfaces with an interocular HUD, this combination giving her state DOD supported super powers; we can see hints of what is yet to come with wearable technology in the more distant future!
Fabric that generates power to charge batteries, a critical innovation that will pave the way for smart clothing in the future! The first smart clothing will likely come to market as more expensive winter jackets that companies like Outdoor Research and REI sell in the $300-700 range. I image that power generating shoes in the sub $250 per pair price range will be other examples of near term smart clothing, if you consider shoes part of your clothing.
I was at WSU in 2003 when I came up with the idea of putting a pizeo electric generator into a shoe, but never went beyond doing a simple paper on the subject, one that was not syndicated or published, turned it in as a class assignment on conceptual ideas for mobile power generators. It seems others are going forward with this technology! Woot Woot. I might have gone further with the idea, desiring an on the go charing solution for my phone, but my grandfathers suicide at the time and the dissolution of my first serious relationship at the same time left me depressed, disenchanted, frustrated, angry and distracted. I ended up leaving WSU shortly thereafter and ultimately finished college at the UW!
Later I thought that putting thin film solar into clothing sounded like a good idea! Solar Backpacks were the first polished consumer products that I found with this technology!
Hey, have you checked the solar backpacks here?
ReplyDelete