There were plenty of new 'wearables' on offer at the Mobile World Congress but will head-up displays and smartwatches ever catch on?
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By: TXYI
Added: 30-06-14
- It turns out that the future isn't orange, it's not in your hands, or on a tablet or in your smartphone.
It can't be found in a tweet or a Facebook update. The future, according to the tech whizz-kids at the Mobile World Congress (MWC), is going to be strapped to your wrist, stuck to your forehead, sealed into your shoes and embedded in your clothes.
Smartwatches and funny nike free australia headbands were de rigeur for the tech-lover in Barcelona last week. For non-nerds, MWC is like Fashion Week for techies. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg was there, along with 1,800 tech companies represented by lots of very important middle-aged men, such as Jon Matonis from Bitcoin, Stephen T.
Odell from Ford and Lance Howarth, of Raspberry Pi. And they were all getting hot under the collar about wearable tech. But wearables aren't as new-fangled as Google and Nike might have you believe.
Tony Russell-Rose, founder of UXLabs, which provides user-experience research and design services remembers head-up displays (HUDs) were used in the military 10 to 20 years ago. "Instead of screens, the information was projected up to two feet away and could be seen by lots of people, so this 'new' technology is just adapting that," he says.
But Bob Stone, who runs the Human Interface Technologies team at the University of Birmingham, adds that, "they left an awful lot to be desired from a human factors perspective".
Only in the past year have wearables become affordable and ergonomic enough for the consumer market. Life-logging cameras such as Autographer, which hangs round your neck nike free australia and sporadically takes photos of the world around you, are beginning to catch on. They're useful for people with dementia, who need reminders of what they did five minutes ago.
The other main type of user is Facebook addicts, who also feel the need to compulsively record their lives and have a similar attention span.
Similarly, smartwatches and fitness trackers are on early adopters' wrists everywhere. Pebble (
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