Category Archives: Wearable Computers

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3d Semiconductors …
At several of the George Gilder Telecosm conferences that I have attended, there have been discussions about the evolution towards 3 dimensional semiconductors. It has been said that this will be a huge leap in semiconductor fabrication which will provide huge leaps in capabilities and power.

One of the most amazing presenters was Carver Mead (now at Foveon), who indicated that with no new knowledge or further advances in semiconductor science we can expect to see a 100,000 times increase in the compute capacity of our home computers … all in the next decade or so! All of this continues to feed the acceleration of technology and what we can create. This article is a great one that outlines the details of 3d Semiconductors, the history, the issues, and the solutions.

http://www.sciam.com/2002/0102issue/0102lee.html

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More Wearable Computer fashion … from e-Holster …
This is a cool site that is offering some new fashion for the fringe crowd that is into wearing their electronics. Of course in the coming years these guys are going to be bought, or put out of business, as the big fashion and clothing vendors jump in and begin to address the needs of the electronic consumer …

http://www.eholster.com

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More articles on the 802.11b “parasitic grid” conversation …
Althought many people (like the cell phone companies) don’t like the concept, and many people (like the creators/users) don’t like the name, the result will end up being the same. We are going to see the development of a global wireless solution created by the users … and our organization is working to contribute to this. 80211.net is one of our “fun” projects that is slowly making progress … 😉

O’Reilly Networks’s Rob Flickenger and Dave Sims discuss the parasitic grid: nice discussion between two clued-in folks.

[80211b News]

Users reject notion of parasitic grid: although InfoWorld didn’t publish any of the many letters I was cc’d on about a column that appared in its pages a few weeks ago about free wireless networks, it did run this odd article. (My take on the initial issue is here.)

[80211b News]

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New antenna designs …
For wearable and mobile computing to take place, in my opinion, there will have to be some real transitions in how we think about wireless communciations. I do not believe that we will have one type of wireless, but several. So technologies which contribute to these architectures will continue to show up. Here is a company that is developing new antenna designs that allow a single antenna to be used for multiple wireless solutions at the same time. Cool stuff …

http://www.skycross.com/

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More on Ginger …
So this is a late post … and everyone has read or seen “Ginger” by now. Or most everyone. I wanted to post some links, and also make a few comments.

The most amazing thing about the Segway HT is that we are now seeing some of the potential that Ray Kurzweil alludes to. The Segway is an amazing device that can actually “balance” … and it can do so with a human rider! How can it do this? The same way that a human does! What we are seeing is when technology begins to reproduce or exceed the some of the same capabilities of a human being. The Segway HT is able to detect motion and “balance” (much like the inner ear), it is able to compute corrections (much like the brain and nervous system), and it is able to move itself (much like the muscles in our legs) to stay balanced.

I want one of these really bad … not only to experience, but to own one of the first pieces of a whole new realm of possibility!

http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1006-200-8020427.html?tag=mn_hd

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,186660,00.html

http://www.time.com/time/2001/segway/index.html

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Mesh Networks … the next step in wireless?
Over the last several years doing my research into wearable computers (and thinking about how to do peer to peer wireless with my friends while we are rollerblading!) I began to look into packet relay using low-power radios. I was then at one of the George Gilder Telecosm conferences where a presenter from MIT talked about his research into these types of networks.

The presenter (I can’t find his name now) talked about how huges areas could be covered with low power radios, and that they would relay/route for each other to allow for massive distributed networks to be created. I was intrigued. I started to look for radios that would meet the criteria that I had … decent distance with mid-speed bandwith. I am still looking for affordable radios to do this, but believe that I found some at Comdex that will fit the bill … more on this later.

The next steps were to think about routing in a completely distributed “mesh” network. If a group of people (firefighters, search and rescue, my friends and I on blades …) are scattered across a physical area, then how do you do the routing? If everyone relays all packets, then you run into the issues of too much noise and unnecessary packet repeating. How do you route then?

The answer hit me (of course while in the shower!) several months back while pondering this … GPS! With GPS I can actually create a routing protocol that is completely dependent on physical location … not network connections. If each person not only has a radio, but a working GPS, then I can address someone by their location. I have a location, and my friend has a location. I send a packet with my source location, and their destination location. Anyone that “hears” my packet can then determine if they are “in between” the two locations, and if it makes sense for them to relay the packet to assist.

When this hit me, I knew that I have this figured out. I am now on my quest for radios, and as I get my two new Xybernaut wearable computers, I am going to begin to work on this. In the mean time, one of my consulting clients is doing some work in this area to address some last-mile wireless issues … and this article is showing that the understanding of “mesh network” potential is growing!

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991593

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Comdex … slow, but a valuable trip …
I just returned from Comdex, and there were some real valuable finds … in a wide range of areas. I’ll be writing about a number of the companies and solutions in future stories, and as I get to evaluate the products. There were also a number of trends that were noticeable … the prescence of numerous tablet computers, wearable computers, heads up displays, 802.11b, Bluetooth, 802.11a, and solid state disk drives.

Tablets and wearables …
It seemed that there were a large number of WinCE tablet computers at Comdex this year. I am not impressed with these machines … although they appear to provide some level of features and functions. WinCE is still a limited OS, and the application support just isn’t there. Although the current price point is very good, most of the vendors were even pushing their solutions as a Windows “thin-client” solution … remotely display applications that were running on another machine. This just doesn’t make sense to me.
Peppered throughout the various WinCE solutions, were a few unique solutions that caught my attention … of course Xybernaut, along with PaceBlade, and a few others. These are full blown PCs, running full operatings systems. The PaceBlade was actually impressive as a tablet PC. I’m thinking that I will have to get one to try!

Wireless … why Bluetooth is lame …
I really wanted to check out the situation with Bluetooth wireless … and I found that it is in a miserable state! The products are coming available … most are already falling into commodity pricing due to Pacific Rim manufacturers. The software however sucks … big time! Most every vendor had their own little applications that would display Bluetooth devices and services, and allow for you to interact with these … but all in their own unique ways. The worst part of this is that I could not find a vendor who was willing to give away a developer kit that would allow the creation of new and innovative applications! When I found a vendor who seemed to think it was a good idea, they immediately indicated that they could put one together for me for thousands of dollars … yeah, right! Why would I pay for a dev kit to sell more hardware for a company? They could be paying me to assist them! How do they expect the “killer app” to be created for Bluetooth, when no one is releasing the foundation for new applications to developers? Bluetooth is doomed, IMHO, unless the vendors do something soon.
I’m meeting with a friend who works on the Bluetooth standards commitee on Monday … I am going to have a long talk with her and see what can be done …

Solid state flash disk …
One last thing for this post … the solid state disks are looking good. There were several vendors who offered IDE solid state flash disks with up to 2GB of capacity. This is going to be very good for the mobile market, and also for more fault tolerence in server boot drives of Internet appliances. These things are lightweight, fast, and reliable. They can take 1MM writes per sector … so it’s a lot of data. You will want an OS that does read-after-write verifications though …

I’ll be writing more soon … but the trip was inspiring … there were a lot of the components that I have been looking for … so that I can continue to create the future …

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Down at Comdex … creating the future …
I’m down in Las Vegas … spent the whole day, and will be here all day tomorrow as well. It’s been a fun day so far. The registration was light, there was security present at the doors, and the number of people on the floor was light.

I’m walking the floor with a good friend, John Pugh, who I haven’t seen in quite a while. I’s a blast to get a chance to brainstorm with him … spew ideas at him … and catch up on things.

It’s been a fun show, and as usual I spent my time looking through all of the little booths that are here representing the various Pacific Rim countries – Korea, Thailand, Tiawan, etc. I have to say that the Korea booths were filled with some cool stuff … a lot of wireless, new funky computer cases, and some other cool products. I barely made it half way through the Tiawan section, and so we are going to pick up there tomorrow morning.

I spent some time at the Xybernaut booth … I’ll be working closely with them as we move forward with HumanXtensions. Here at the show, most of the folks are oriented towards WinCE, Palm, and the new PocketPC 2002 … but Xybernaut and few others are seeing the future … full blown PCs with full power operating systems.

I found a large number of interesting technologies and products … I found the LCD panels that I wanted for one application … and I’m searching for the others tomorrow. I found some cool peripherals, and several interesting security peripherals. There are large numbers of “Internet Appliances”, or appliance developer kits …

I’ll be writing all about this in the upcoming month or so … there is a lot going on in the market place!

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The NoKeyboard solution for mobile and wearable computers …
Virtual typing … now I really like this solution! This company has developed a virtual keyboard solution that allows you to type by simply typing in air or on a desk. There are little sensors that connect to your fingers which detect finger motion … and the system analyzes the motion to determine what key you would have hit if there was a keyboard present!

It appears that they have pulled together some AI that also analyzes the users habits to improve the typing accuracy. I am going to go see these folks at Comdex … I leave tomorrow!

Virtual Keyboard press release …

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NoCatAuth … moving in the right direction!
This is a very good article about a very cool project! This is the beginning of the infrastructure required for a good global wireless network. It is a authentication system for wireless users which provides a good web-based authentication scheme, along with bandwidth throttling and other features.

My team and I are about to install and experiment with a copy of this stuff for our upcoming 802.11 project …

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/wireless/2001/11/09/nocatauth.html