Here Comes the Age of Magic
Originally posted by scott_adams_blo at Here Comes the Age of Magic
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/ihdT/~3/0FtWm1RrUtI/
http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/1119/
I expect someday to wear at least five tech devices at the same time:
1. Phone (in pocket)
2. Watch
3. Ring
4. Glasses
5. Ear bud
And thanks to the coming Internet of Things, every device in my environment will be connected. Combine wearable tech with the Internet of Things and you have the Era of Magic.
One of the rules I expect to emerge from the wearable tech industry is the idea that your abilities double every time you add a new connected device to your body. For example, having your phone with you creates one layer of identification. But having your phone, ring, watch, ear bud, and glasses with you is far greater assurance that you are who you say you are.
I would imagine that people have very specific walking and moving patterns. If you kill me and steal my five wearable tech devices they would eventually deduce by how you move that you are not me and the devices would shut off. That system only works if you have multiple wearable devices that are all synched, so again, more is better.
Having a paired watch and phone is great, but add a ring to the mix and your capabilities double. That's because you need both a ring and a watch to detect the position of the user's hand. And you need a ring for one-handed mouse-clicking in the air. Imagine walking to a crosswalk and doing the "halt" hand motion in the direction of traffic. Your ring and your watch can tell by their orientation to each other that you have formed that gesture and so they send a "pedestrian waiting" message to the street light. The lights change for you and you cross. It will feel like magic.
Or point at something in a vending machine and your watch and ring can detect which item you selected, charge your credit card, and send a code to release the item. To an observer it will seem that you pointed at an item and magic released it.
I also imagine that the rules of polite behavior will force wearers of tech glasses to signal what they are up to. For example, let's say you can't hear incoming phone calls unless you cup your hand to your ear. The ear bud and the ring would detect that they are in close proximity and release the audio. That way whoever is in the room with you knows you are focused on something remote. It's more polite.
Likewise I imagine that in order to read something with your Internet-connected glasses you will have to make a gesture as if your hand is a piece of paper and you are reading it. The hand gesture tells observers you are paying attention to something on the Internet. Again you probably need both your watch and your ring to detect that gesture.
I wonder if someday your tech glasses will be designed to read personalized messages overlaid on your environment without the glasses being connected to the Internet. In other words, the glasses would act more like electronic filters than like computers. The computing would be embedded in the environment and serving up messages on walls, furniture, screens, and name tags. But each message would be on a frequency specific to the viewers in the room. My glasses might only see every 76th bit while yours only see the 925th bit in the stream. A thousand people in a room would each see different personalized messages in the environment. That would feel less creepy than knowing someone is reading TMZ in their glasses while you talk to them.
That's how I see our cyborg future - lots of small tech upgrades that add up over time. My plan is to keep adding artificial parts until one day I die and no one even notices because my organic parts weren't doing much work anyway.
______________________________________
Scott Adams
Co-founder of CalendarTree.com
Author of this book
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/ihdT/~3/0FtWm1RrUtI/
http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/1119/
I expect someday to wear at least five tech devices at the same time:
1. Phone (in pocket)
2. Watch
3. Ring
4. Glasses
5. Ear bud
And thanks to the coming Internet of Things, every device in my environment will be connected. Combine wearable tech with the Internet of Things and you have the Era of Magic.
One of the rules I expect to emerge from the wearable tech industry is the idea that your abilities double every time you add a new connected device to your body. For example, having your phone with you creates one layer of identification. But having your phone, ring, watch, ear bud, and glasses with you is far greater assurance that you are who you say you are.
I would imagine that people have very specific walking and moving patterns. If you kill me and steal my five wearable tech devices they would eventually deduce by how you move that you are not me and the devices would shut off. That system only works if you have multiple wearable devices that are all synched, so again, more is better.
Having a paired watch and phone is great, but add a ring to the mix and your capabilities double. That's because you need both a ring and a watch to detect the position of the user's hand. And you need a ring for one-handed mouse-clicking in the air. Imagine walking to a crosswalk and doing the "halt" hand motion in the direction of traffic. Your ring and your watch can tell by their orientation to each other that you have formed that gesture and so they send a "pedestrian waiting" message to the street light. The lights change for you and you cross. It will feel like magic.
Or point at something in a vending machine and your watch and ring can detect which item you selected, charge your credit card, and send a code to release the item. To an observer it will seem that you pointed at an item and magic released it.
I also imagine that the rules of polite behavior will force wearers of tech glasses to signal what they are up to. For example, let's say you can't hear incoming phone calls unless you cup your hand to your ear. The ear bud and the ring would detect that they are in close proximity and release the audio. That way whoever is in the room with you knows you are focused on something remote. It's more polite.
Likewise I imagine that in order to read something with your Internet-connected glasses you will have to make a gesture as if your hand is a piece of paper and you are reading it. The hand gesture tells observers you are paying attention to something on the Internet. Again you probably need both your watch and your ring to detect that gesture.
I wonder if someday your tech glasses will be designed to read personalized messages overlaid on your environment without the glasses being connected to the Internet. In other words, the glasses would act more like electronic filters than like computers. The computing would be embedded in the environment and serving up messages on walls, furniture, screens, and name tags. But each message would be on a frequency specific to the viewers in the room. My glasses might only see every 76th bit while yours only see the 925th bit in the stream. A thousand people in a room would each see different personalized messages in the environment. That would feel less creepy than knowing someone is reading TMZ in their glasses while you talk to them.
That's how I see our cyborg future - lots of small tech upgrades that add up over time. My plan is to keep adding artificial parts until one day I die and no one even notices because my organic parts weren't doing much work anyway.
______________________________________
Scott Adams
Co-founder of CalendarTree.com
Author of this book