sunglasses with a bluetooth headset
Wednesday, January 19th, 2005Semi-interesting article in the news: Motorola and Oakley are working to create glasses with a built-in bluetooth headset. I mention this as only “semi-interesting”, because this will probably be so overpriced (like all other Oakley eyeglass products) that it won’t be worth buying. However, along with the Thump, Oakley and Motorola shows that some people may finally be understanding the true concept of wearable computing: technology that actually integrates seemlessly onto someone’s body and into a their daily life, rather than just strapping a piece of technology to the body and calling it wearable.
The next step will (hopefully) be further integration of the headset and glasses to give people a heads-up display to display information directly onto the glasses. If someone can figure out a useful multi-modal interface (combination voice recognition/facial expression/body movement) for such a wearable system, this will be the true “killer” app that all of the mobile phone/camera/mp3 player/FM radio/browser/email/toaster convergent devices aren’t: real mobile devices that have a useable display and simple interface.
