[General Topics] Ben Buchanan:
A few more thoughts for the XDA III+ Wishlist...

i) Improvement of pen digitiser over original XDA... pressure sensitivity to allow Fractal Painter type drawing.

ii) Again not yet sure what the XDA II has as a belt attachment clip but the XDA I case I got was much too bulky... the good part was the clip that was quick release but secure the rest of the time. So less bulk (may have already been solved).

[found a really good way to mount wearables that is comfortable and ideal for the centralisation of processing 'on the body' - The XDA and all other formfactors I've seen are way off base]

iii) I mentioned video out but better I/O all round is going to be the key to this becoming a good wearable [sic].

On the subject or wearables I have been trying to envisage life once 'augmented reality' is possible through having an inline screen on my glasses. Essentially a walkman/iPod is already augmented reality in the audio senses however I think this whole field is going to be able to be moved forward much further and could create a whole range of jobs for many web/tech workers who are currently feeling the pain after the dot.com bubble.

Firstly I was in the kitchen and imagined the information that could be made available when doing cooking or cleaning tasks... if the cameras had detection of other spectrums beyond that of our eye we could perhaps view where the bench needed cleaning most or when pots can detect the properties of food reporting things like 'too sweet' - 'just right' etc... there is also the standard stuff like bringing up iTV video of recipies being prepared and also I realised warning lights and those sort of things become less necessary on devices since if one looked at the kettle it could simply show a status with the words 'on' or 'hot' or 'off' etc... above it. Of course this would either need the recognition of the kettle or some way to know where the kettle was in relation to the user but the possibilities are there and potentially [definitely] life improving.

I also remembered where I had seen the camera on the bridge of the glasses before... it was in Mission Impossible when Ethan Hawke showed that Jim was still alive in the train and at some time earlier in the movie was used too [have moved to stereo - bridge now houses other things]. I was thinking of uses for this sort of eyewear too when I was on a bushwalk yesterday and climbed up onto a cliff overlooking the interior of the gorge but still within it. I really wanted to know what was behind the next hill and thought that with digital terrain modelling if I had been able to see an overlay semi-tranparent picture (augmented reality) of the view 'through' the hill it would have made my sight-seeing all the more enjoyable. I also thought as it was dense bush climbing up the hill that it would be cool to have the gyro/compass on the headset provide bearing data across the top of the virtual screen (of course GPS could do the same but perhaps not perfectly in real-time) and track markers could also pop up [found out these are not really necessary] when and where the path changed. It would be neat also for recognising features as one passed through the geography, telling the history of the place in the period one wanted to know about or providing details of the local amenities upon demand/command. In any case the need for the eyewear is enormous and would render most screens obsolete... or provide a screen wherever one wants one like wherever a picture frame is a different picture could be provided for each viewer, etc... (Bill Gates ought to like this because he owns the digital rights to many pieces of art - give me a call Bill :-) ).

I also thought that the eyewear with knowledge of its location removes the need for holographic projection since if several people were looking at the same 'virtual object' through their eyewear then it could appear as solid as the projection onto the eye allows [came up with a great way to 'turn night into day and day into night' in effect].

So summary is I think augmented reality is going to be far more entertaining than virtual reality (sort of like that bit in The Beach were Leonardo is bounding through the forest in computer game mode) and the cost/benefit of eyewear is going to save the wasted production of millions of screens and create massive revenue potential for tourism and interactive TV applications that will have a real impact on quality of experience and quality of life. The educational possibilities are fantastic too... a child could learn three+ languages by having their portable recognise objects and teach them the name for it in each language etc...

[gone way beyond the above examples now - found out a health reason for AR too, kids under about 8 get alterations in their visual perceptive abilities if they spend too long in total VR emersion. AR solves this]

Two other things... if Microsoft doesn't move in this direction quickly and tries to slow down the release of such technology (as has been their strategy or default action with the release of the PC OS in some cases) then I don't mind if it is done on Linux... as long as it gets done. Any Linux or MS guys feel free to comment here too [no one has offered any comments in this area - I have moved on to find (better) mass parallel hardware, optics is not going to cut it in the next 5 years either].

Finally I think perhaps HTC could hold the key to moving these devices forward faster, just as Sony has improved the capabilities and usability of PalmOS... there is no point waiting for new OS releases if you can bundle other software onto a device with Telecom operators and move it forward faster... it will have to happen anyway because charging for traffic isn't going to be viable for long. [clarification - that was in reference to PDAs as becoming handsets - generally now thinking that silicon can't cut it for the uses I am now looking at with the glasses - that is not to say that handsets don't have a few years yet but the technology is dog slow and being painfully slowly released - Take the Mobile Explorer browser for example in WinCE, the programmable API version of this is clearly intended not to allow the same functionality as the Microsoft IE application itself on the PocketPC (I can see the devious thinking of separating it). This is just plain infuriating because if MS wasn't deliberately slowing down the development of the browser it could be modified to be the universal window on a PocketPC for any app - e.g integration with video overlays/3D/SVG etc, that's all a browser is, a window with greater API functionality - as such this restriction has forced me off the whole platform (early)... e.g. other factors such as output resolution/speed/memory are also looming]