DALnetizen - Wearable Computers

Wearable Computers

We live in a connected world, a fast paced world, where mobility and convenience are vital to our way of life. So what do you get if you mix a PC the size of a box of matches, a glove based input device _ instead of those nasty styluses or tiny keyboards PDAs have - and a G3 cellular network? You get a highly mobile computing experience with blistering Internet speeds. Everything a desktop can offer and more, with added convenience.

By far the most effective input device has proven to be the regular full-sized keyboard, having a width of around 19mm and a vertical length of 3-4mm. This size is well suited to a desktop, which spends it life sitting in your office or your home but ill suited to PDAs or wearable computers. Keyboards have been miniaturized for PDAs but they are cumbersome and far from speedy.

Stanford University Professor Vaughan R. Pratt inventor of the system - which he refers to as 'thumbing' - that may one day see tiny keyboards replaced with an inspired, one-handed sign language that is the last word on touch typing.

Dr. Pratt, the specialist in wearable computers, has designed a glove that allows the user to type on the hand rather then on a keyboard. The user slipping their hand into a sensor filled glove, thus turning their hand into a 3x4 keypad, achieves this.

Entering characters is as easy as tapping the thumb on the buttons located on the tip, middle or base of the fingers. The character set can be expanded from 12 characters to 96 by holding some fingers together and some apart.

Dr. Patt's glove can be used with his previous invention a wearable PC that he shrank down to four cubic inches and a web server he shrank down to one cubic inch (around the size of a box of matches).

Although the approximate speed for the glove would be around 30 words per minute, Dr. Pratt said the characters in thumb code were very easy to learn. There is also the added bonus that the while using the glove you are able to look up and read from a document you may be transcribing unlike stylus based systems.

The most often used letters (the vowels and a smattering of constants) have been assigned easier positions, like the tips of the fingers. Less often used letters have been assigned to the base of the fingers, which is a tad more difficult to do. The letters on the glove have been positioned optimally just as on QWERTY and DVORK keyboards.

Dr. Starner used only a Twiddler (www.handykey.com) to write his Ph.D. dissertation. It's a device that sits in your hand. One or more keys are pressed to form a character, word or phrase. He has managed to get up to 60 words per minute on the Twiddler but only through much practice and an abundance of macros.

With the existence (or soon to be existence in some places) of G3 cellular networks - which are slated to allow speeds up to a few Mbit/sec - and wearable computers, the time where we will be able to walk around the park or go to the beach and use a ultra lightweight wearable computers and have high speed access to the Internet or other data is fast approaching.

We certainly do live in interesting times; we can but look ahead to the future and wonder what is to come. And then enjoy it to the utmost.