Perhaps the world is ready for a new mobile device that will become the icon of the real mobile internet revolution.
What would the device do? Most likely it would work first in Wi-Fi hotspots, connecting from further afield as the range of 802.11-based access points grows and other wireless networks emerge. It would probably do VoIP and IM exceedingly well. It would possibly also do email, RSS, and music. All these we can pretty much take for granted. More interestingly, it may start doing completely different things. Its ability to go where laptops can’t go, and do things that mobile phones can’t do, will create new needs and new opportunities, which make people write new apps.
It might be used to access place and event information in the form of annotated maps for instance. Or it might be used to download and watch TV shows. Or make them in the spirit of podcasting and vlogging. When high bandwidth mobile data becomes free, some of those old mobile service ideas that history left for dead might suddenly begin to make a lot more sense. The fact is, we don’t know what the device will be used for. That’s why the code base has to be kept open.
What might the device look like? It would need to be small and afford effortless one-handed use, incorporating the best learnings from over two decades of mobile phone design. This points to a Blackberry-style roller wheel to scroll up and down the buddy list, the email inbox, and the RSS feeds. However, it would also need to have a QWERTY keyboard or some radical new key layout if it’s going to do text input well. The large footprint of a full keyboard suggests a flip design of some sort. But it would have to be extremely slim.
Here are a few sketches.
On the software side, the limited screen real estate requires that the active application must occupy the full screen. IM would probably be the default active app because the presence status of buddies has to be visible at a glance. Switching between apps would need to be extremely simple and smooth, like control-tab on the PC. Perhaps quick switching is important enough to warrant a dedicated button on the side of the device. Click! From IM to email. Click! From email to RSS. And so on.
Here’s a sketch about the ‘full-context switching’ between apps (I looted the term from Chris).
Last week Nokia displayed a fuel cell-powered Bluetooth headset, which is now undergoing user trials (see the last slide in Yrjö Neuvo’s presentation). Sure, the increase in battery life is a major incremental improvement. However, in his blog Christian Lindholm suggests the replacement of the solid battery with a fluid tank may trigger radical innovation in the design of mobile electronics by enabling form factors that have previously been possible only in sci-fi movies. “Liquid is esentially free from form and will thus enable us to make radically different electronics. It will stimulate an era of organically shaped electronics,” he predicts. I agree. What’s exciting about fuel cells is not their capacity as a power source, it’s their potency to catalyze a new design paradigm.
What brand of recording eyewear would match your style: Gucci, Armani, O’Neill… Or: Apple, Sony, Nokia…?
A few years ago my DJ friend taped a small condenser microphone to his glasses to record audio samples on the street, in elevators, wherever he went but couldn’t bring a conventional mic. Now the smallest affordable camera optics are about the size of his mic, so I wonder who’s going to be the first to integrate fashion with function and introduce eyewear that doubles as a stylish and intuitive image capture device.
A pair of such glasses might be built like this: the left framing could house the camera, the right one a directional mic. Behind one ear could be a jack for connecting to an iPod or a cell phone for power and data transfer. Perhaps on some models, behind the ears there could be pull-out earpieces and a pull-out handsfree mic tube.
It’s not hard to think of applications: no more hassling with digital cameras or camera phones, just touch your eyewear to start recording. OCR for reading glasses would be cool, and glasses that stamped each captured image with a GPS location and the direction the camera is pointing would enable someone like Google to build virtual walkthroughs of places by combining imagery from different viewers’ eyes.
Steve Mann has of course been inventing and using wearcam stuff for a couple of decades already, but now the technology is approaching a price point that warrants more commercial speculation. So I wonder, will one of the big technology players be first to bring recording eyewear to the market, or might the first-mover opportunity be seized by a new entrant perhaps joining forces with some well-known designer?
For a few years now, socially-minded tinkerers have been building various systems for locating friends in bars. The most popular approach to solving this problem technically has been to dump the required computation about where you are to the user (see Imahima and Dodgeball, for instance). The problem is that to shout “Here I am!” users have to learn to input the commands, which is a bit clumsy even on i-mode phones. Another approach has been to use GPS or cellular positioning, but even where the technology is available, it’s not precise enough. A third way is the check-in/check-out approach, where some piece of technology (usually a low-cost card-swiper, infrared beacon, or RFID reader) is installed in the physical setting and users carry some sort of ID tags. There the problem is the cost and scalability. When building the Aula space for instance, we wanted for there to be a graceful way to let other members know when you’re there. After months of negotiations with the building management, wiring the door locks, and scavenging hardware, we managed to get the RFID-based Hunaja system working. But transferring the system to other premises was too costly, and so we had to shut Hunaja down when Aula left that space. The fourth and most recent solution is to do the tracking with WiFi or Bluetooth, although users then need an expensive terminal. Even if no one has quite figured it out yet, there might be a niche for a business model here, because (some) proprietors are willing to pay to attract a community of regulars, and (some) people will pay to publish their whereabouts to their small worlds when they’re out in town. (Although for sure it does have its problems, like stalking.)
