Why Wearable Tech Will Be as Big as the Smartphone

Google Glass was just the beginning. A new generation of wearable tech is coming—and it will transform the way you experience the world.

Data will not help you if you can’t see it when you need it. For Dan Eisenhardt ... teamed up with some other students, and in January 2008, after a year or so of tinkering, four of the classmates founded Recon Instruments.

• Their first product, Recon Snow, is a heads-up display for skiers and snowboarders. From the outside it looks just like any set of ski goggles. But tucked below the right eye is a little display, controllable by a simple remote—snow-proof with big, chunky buttons—that clips to a jacket.

  • The main screen is a dashboard that shows speed, altitude, and vertical descent.

  • There’s also a navigation view that uses the built-in GPS to plot position on a resort map,

  • as well as an app screen that offers access to a camera.

  • Through Bluetooth, the display integrates with a smartphone, letting skiers play music, answer calls, and see text messages or other notifications. Recon has sold 50,000 of the Snow so far, and the second generation, Snow2, came out in November.

The company’s next product—Jet, designed for cyclists, with voice control and gaze detection for hands-free use—will ship in March.

Technically, the Recon doesn’t do anything that the average smartphone couldn’t. The lavish array of sensors in today’s phones can chart speed and altitude; social networking apps can find friends and set up voice or video chats; any number of map apps can navigate users down a mountain. That is, a smartphone would do those things—if users could access it on a ski slope or cycling run. But they can’t, at least not without risking a crack in their screen or their head. What Recon sells is the ability to see all the crucial data, and only the crucial data, at times when it would otherwise remain locked away. It brings the power of the smartphone out of your pocket and into your field of vision, accessible any time you glance its way.

This is the promise of wearable technology, and it’s the reason—after more than 20 years of tinkering by cybernetics enthusiasts—we’re finally seeing an explosion of these devices on the market.

It’s the reason ...

• Google has poured millions into an improbable set of eyeglasses,

• why Samsung has unveiled a companion watch for its smartphones, and

• why Apple is widely rumored to be exploring something similar.

• tiny companies banked thousands of preorders last year for smartwatches, gesture-controlled armbands, transmitting rings, notification bracelets, and more.

A new device revolution is at hand:

Just as mobile phones and tablets displaced the once-dominant PC, so wearable devices are poised to push smartphones aside.

In purely technological terms, the wearable revolution could take shape much faster than the mobile revolution that preceded it: wearable manufacturers can piggyback on those innovations using simple Bluetooth or other protocols to communicate with a smartphone and thus with the outside world. With all that prebaked hardware and wireless connectivity—and huge preorders from crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter—it has become possible for tiny companies to dream up, build, and sell wearable devices in competition with big companies, a feat that was never possible with smartphones.

One study of smartphone users indicates that on average we unlock our gadgets more than 100 times a day, with some of us pawing at screens far more often than that. Internet analyst Mary Meeker estimates that as many as two-thirds of those uses could be handled with a wearable device.

Wearable devices—technology that people will want to display on their bodies, for all to see—represent a new threshold in aesthetics. The tech companies that mastered design will now need to conquer the entirely different realm of fashion. And that could require technologists to unlearn a great deal of what they think they know.

That demands more than just a gorgeous product; it demands a fashionable product. And the tricky task of wearables makers will be to understand the distinction. One can boil that difference down to two basic rules.

1. The first is what we might call—with apologies for the vulgarism—the Bluedouche principle. For those who don’t remember the term, it’s an epithet hurled circa 2007 at anyone who walked around talking on a Bluetooth earpiece all day. For all their functionality, and for all the attempts to make more stylish models (Jawbone sells beautiful and highly ingenious ones), earpieces have never succeeded in shedding this fundamental perception of lameness.

2. If the first rule presents a challenge for wearables as they gain acceptance, the second will present a problem once they really take off. Call this the Trucker Hat principle, after the low-fashion item that became popular as a hipster accessory in the early aughts and then lost steam precisely for its popularity. Everybody was wearing one, so it wasn’t cool anymore.

“When a style of clothing I own becomes too commonplace, I usually quit wearing it”

In these early days, it’s the Bluedouche problem—the social message that our wearable tech is sending—that most needs to be overcome.

• “Capturing people’s imagination in a way that makes them want to put your stuff on their body is a skill set that not many people have,”

• In just the past year, Apple alone has hired executives from Burberry, Levi Strauss, and Yves Saint Laurent—in the last case, to head up a “special projects” division that many suspect will wind up creating wearable devices.

It’s an auspicious moment for wearables, one that’s been two decades in the making.

Read the whole story at Wired