Excuse the forward, but this touches on some of the personal information
space considerations of Twisted. For additional illustration, may I
suggest adding a Bruce Sterling book of short stories to your reading
list, "A Good Old-Fashioned Future". In particular, the story "Maneki
Neko" illustrates a future application of portable machines and
Memex/Twisted/ReputationNetwork systems for distributed gift-culture
collectives. Like ours. :-)
Jason
Begin forwarded message:
From: "David P. Reed" <dpreed@reed.com>
Date: Thu Jan 31, 2002 12:20:41 PM US/Central
To: rhodes@alum.mit.edu, "Thad E. Starner" <thad@cc.gatech.edu>
Cc: wearables@cc.gatech.edu
Subject: Re: [wearables] commercial survey - IEEE Pervasive Computing
Though I'm still quite excited about the potential of self-contained
general purpose wearables, I have to say that the capabilities of my
Kyocera QCP6035 Smartphone, the Samsung palmphone and the upcoming Treo
are impressively general, and because they can be augmented by
intelligence on the Internet quite easily (having escaped the walled
garden of WAP), they can be quite general purpose. Already they can do
something quite cool - you can attach a small GPS receiver (Pharos) to
them and get live location info that drives the navigation through
geographic data on the Internet. There are no car-mount or portable
GPS navigation systems that can access up-to-date maps and directions -
they run off of internal data only.
Thus the commercial world surrounding the Palm OS-based phones is
actually poised ready to go beyond PIMs into new apps. The big limit
is the bitrate on CDMA and GSM nets that is available (very low, so it
pays to have local cache).
The real problem inhibiting the market is the odd idea that what you
want to do with a mobile device is the class of things you do sitting
at a desk in your study or office. I don't want to browse the Web in
general - or compose documents or read long Microsoft word attachments.
But the Palm phones are plenty powerful enough to do cool things in
conjunction with general purpose intelligence elsewhere.
At 09:56 AM 1/31/2002 -0800, Bradley Rhodes wrote:
Computer enthusiasts have been known to rewrite a MP3 player's
interface software to allow the uploading and downloading of any
type of data, effectively making the device into the equivalent
of a large floppy disk. More recently, these devices are
merging with PDAs and cellular phones to create a wide variety
of available products. IDC expects sales of portable devices
with digital audio playback capability to grow to 15 million
units by 2005. In a sense, these devic
It's not just computer enthusiasts anymore. The iPod is both an
MP3 player or, at the flip of a switch, a firewire 5G hard
drive. A friend of mine uses it both to play music and to store
all her personal email, so she can read email at work without
tainting company disk with it.
You touched on the question of general-purpose, but I'd love to
see it addressed further. The average PC owner has a web browser,
email reader, full office suite and game machine all in one
box. Because of inherent interface constraints, the Palm Pilot is
only widely used for PIM applications: short memos, calendar,
phone and to-do lists. Wearables have even more interface
constraints than pen-based systems, which implies to me they'll
be even more task specific, at least until we get a bluetooth
equivalent that lets you have task-specific interfaces all
sharing one processor/memory/battery attached to the belt
somewhere.
Comments?
Brad
--
Bradley Rhodes
Intelligence Augmentation | Software Agents | Wearable Computing
http://www.bradleyrhodes.com/
- David
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