Ivan Poupyrev, Google’s director of engineering and the inventor of Jacquard, envisions future applications for business attire. “You can check stock prices,” he says, or blinking LEDs could notify the wearer when it’s time to get to a meeting and provide directions to the conference room.
The technology will be subtle in appearance: “We found that brands were reluctant to put too much visible technology on the product,” Mr. Poupyrev says. “It’s really important that the product doesn’t feel like a gadget.”
Dr. Eagleman founded NeoSensory in 2015 in Palo Alto, Calif., not far from Stanford University, where he’s an adjunct professor. Its aim is to develop haptic wearables that offer new ways of experiencing the world. The first of these is the Buzz, a device geared toward allowing the hearing impaired to perceive the auditory world via haptic vibrations. NeoSensory plans to start selling the Buzz in January for $630, comprised of an upfront fee of $150 and $20 monthly payments for two years.
People with hearing impairments who tested the Buzz said they could recognize noises like oncoming vehicles, crying babies, barking dogs, opening doors, guitar music—even the high-pitched “ding!” of a toaster oven—through a range of distinct vibrations.
Hold on—Palm? The once-mighty, now-defunct maker of the pioneering 1990s personal digital assistants and, later, smartphones? Not exactly. This is a brand-new startup, which has borrowed the original company’s name and at least some of its ethos. Its debut product, the device (Steph) Curry has affixed to himself, is itself known as the Palm. It resembles a smartphone, makes calls, and runs Android apps, but it’s remarkably diminutive—more like a few stacked credit cards than the Hershey bar–size handsets of today.
Despite its nostalgia-inducing moniker, the Palm—scheduled to arrive in November at 1,500 Verizon-owned stores plus resellers—is a new kind of gadget. (“We call the category ‘Palm,’ ” Miloseski declares when I ask, though he and Nuk also bandy about the term “ultramobile.”) Unlike a full-blown smartphone—which it aims to complement rather than replace—the Palm is small enough that you can easily strap it on like Curry is doing, tuck it into a yoga-pants pocket, or drape it around your neck on a lanyard. The software strives to be similarly minimal, safeguarding you against being pelted with notifications or seduced by Instagram, Candy Crush Saga, or other distractions. Palm envisions the $350 device as an alternative to wearables such as the $399 Apple Watch Series 4.
Those still using the original Explorer Edition will explode with envy when they see the Enterprise Edition. For starters, it makes the technology completely accessible for those who wear prescription lenses. The camera button, which sits at the hinge of the frame, does double duty as a release switch to remove the electronics part of unit (called the Glass Pod) from the frame. You can then connect it to safety glasses for the factory floor—EE now offers OSHA-certified safety shields—or frames that look like regular eyewear. (A former division of 3M has been manufacturing these specially for Enterprise Edition; if EE catches on, one might expect other frame vendors, from Warby Parker to Ray-Ban, to develop their own versions.) “We did a lot of work to lighten the weight of the frames to compensate for the additional weight [of the Pod],” says Kothari. “So the overall package with Glass and the frames itself actually comes out to be the average weight of regular glasses.”
Other improvements include beefed-up networking—not only faster and more reliable wifi, but also adherence to more rigorous security standards—and a faster processor as well. The battery life has been extended—essential for those who want to work through a complete eight-hour shift without recharging. (More intense usage, like constant streaming, still calls for an external battery.) The camera was upgraded from five megapixels to eight. And for the first time, a red light goes on when video is being recorded. (Inoculation against Glasshole-dom!)
I started using my Fitbit on December 25, 2013. In the 40 months, it tells me I have walked 10.9 million steps ( 5,277 miles), an average of 9,000 steps a day. I have lost it twice and it has come back to faithfully serve me and sends me flattering badges (like the Africa one when I crossed 5,000 miles). I return the favor and religiously charge it once a week. To say it has kept me somewhat disciplined would be an understatement.
The company is celebrating its tenth anniversary and they shared some staggering numbers tracking the 60 million devices they have sold
3,724,731,035,482 steps taken (that’s 3.7 trillion)
1,480,356 trips around the world
3 Billion nights of sleep tracked
Here is a nice infograph on their history so far – click to enlarge
Harbisson, whose U.K. passport shows he’s the first legally recognized cyborg, was born colorblind. He designed his antenna—which translates colors into one of 360 musical tones he’s memorized—back in 2003 with help from a cyberneticist. At first, he connected it to headphones and a laptop. Eventually, he persuaded a surgeon to drill into his skull, implant a chip, and fuse the antenna to his occipital bone.
The couple say merging technology with their bodies has created new senses. “We are transspecies,” says Ribas, whose three-year-old seismic implant vibrates at different intensities based on data from online seismographs. As with other biohackers, their claims—he says my color registers as an F sharp, for example—are difficult to verify. But their London startup, Cyborg Nest, is manufacturing DIY kits meant to bring their transhumanism closer to the mainstream.
Crafting gadgets that can handle these usage scenarios is tricky, though, but Lenovo has a sense of humor about it. When bending the Cplus to curve around someone's wrist, the Android phone's tall display "cracks" -- actually just a software trick that distorts the screen. The Folio, on the other hand, was more straight-laced. Folding the tablet in half bends the screen around the outside of the chassis, effectively turning it into a big ol' phone.
Worn under Kanaan’s firesuit, the shirt acts as both fireproofing protection and sensor. The fabric of the shirt — not wires or a separate device — senses electrical activity.
“We’re not talking about a bracelet or a separate device; it’s the fabric itself,” said Adam Nelson, vice president, industry solutions, healthcare and life sciences at NTT Data, a Tokyo-based global system integration company. “Because it’s electroconductive polymer, it picks up the heart’s electrical activity. If you position the fabric on certain muscles, it picks up the muscle activity. … It’s a very different type of bio-signal that we capture with the fabric.”
Over the past two years, Under Armour has spent close to $1 billion buying and investing in three leading makers of activity- and diet-tracking mobile apps. By doing so, the company has amassed the world's largest digital health-and-fitness community, with 150 million users. Plank envisions all of those users, and their metrics, as a big data engine to drive everything from product development to merchandising to marketing.
Today, Under Armour has 13,500 employees around the world and nearly $4 billion in revenue. But Plank is still every bit the entrepreneur, chasing audacious dreams--chief among them overtaking Nike as the world's largest sportswear maker. Under Armour leapfrogged the longtime number two, Adidas, in the U.S. sportswear market in 2014, but worldwide it's still third. And Nike remains far larger, with more than $30 billion in revenue in 2015 Which is part of why Plank wants to move so aggressively. Nike has about a fifth as many users on its Nike+ platform as Under Armour does on its apps, and in 2014 the shoe giant shut down its FuelBand fitness-tracker business.
“I said I like the idea, but if we’re going to go this way, I want to develop it,” Akkersdijk says. “I want to look into conducting yarns, into the sensor technology, and how you want to embed it. So what we started to do is, within the production process, is knit the conducting yarns in.”
The first project that would inspire Akkersdijk’s model for the future of wearables wasn’t even a wearable at all. In 2013, Akkersdijk worked with the Technical University of Eindhoven on a pillow that helps people with severe dementia communicate. He did this by designing a thick padded shell with internal motors, so that patients could share their gestures with a person holding the other side of the pillow.
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