“The wearable revolution is real and it’s coming fast,” Kyle Vanhemert writes for Wired. “For designers, though, putting computers on our bodies means tackling two very tricky questions. First, what should these gadgets look like? And second, what can they actually do for us?”
“We can make some good guesses about that first question. The current crop of wearables sorts out into two categories: things we wear on our arms and things we wear on our faces. Assuming we’re not quite ready for the good cyborg life that Google Glass prescribes, that leaves us with the wrist,” Vanhemert writes. “The continued interest in these devices—and, of course, the perennial intrigue surrounding the elusive iWatch—makes one thing clear: People are ready to wear a computer on their wrist. The question that none of the existing products yet answered, however, is this: What should a smartwatch really do?”
“When you consider where the existing crop of smartwatches have failed—trying to cram too much crap in too little space—you start to wonder if we haven’t got the utility here backwards. What if instead of just supplying us with yet another screen, the true potential of the smartwatch lies in giving us an entirely new way to control our digital lives?” Vanhemert asks. “The newer version of Siri that shipped with iOS 7 is much improved, and it stands to reason that our ability to process natural language requests will only get better form here. In terms of device-to-device chatter, Apple recently filed a patent based entirely around the idea of using Siri to control one gadget from another–just the type of technology you’d need if you had a Siri-enabled smartwatch piggybacking off the smartphone in your pocket. So what would this all look like in a few years, if we’re just having fun?”
Much more in the full article – recommended – here.
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