By Omar L. Gallaga, Austin American-Statesman –
In the late ‘90s, I thought I was pretty tech-forward when I went to interviews. I carried a Palm Pilot digital organizer, a bulky cell phone, an analog tape recorder and, of course, a notepad and pen.
Ten years later, the Palm Pilot was gone as my phone began to replace a lot of its uses. The recorder was digital, and I started carrying a small point-and-shoot digital camera.
Today, I only carry a digital pen and pad that double as a recorder and my phone. The phone takes better photos and video than the camera did, and the tiny pen is more reliable for audio than the old recorder.
I like this shedding of gadgets, the unencumbered feeling you get when you carry one thing instead of four or five. This year I’ve wondered a lot about what I want to have on my body at any given time, even when I exercise or sleep.
Earlier this year, I tried the Nike+ FuelBand, a fashionable bracelet that measures your activity. Maybe my expectations were too high, but I wanted it to do more than assign arbitrary points based on how much my arm flails around in a day. I wanted it to measure my heartbeat, track my location on a map when I ask it to, and to give me a pep talk when I don’t feel like getting off the couch. Perhaps all that will happen in a future version.
I had better luck more recently with a product called Zeo, a $99 sleep tracker that you wear around your head. It communicates wirelessly with an iPhone to tell you how well you’re sleeping, tracking the activity through your brainwaves. It told me something I already knew — that I don’t get nearly enough sleep. But it also told me how many times my kids wake me up at night and how much REM sleep I was getting, and it offered advice on what I could be doing to improve my slumber. Sure, the headband looks incredibly goofy and can make a restless night of even more uncomfortable. And the sensor only lasts a few months before it must be replaced.
But it’s very easy to imagine that fitness and sleep trackers, still in their infancy as an early wave of “wearable” computers, are only to get smaller, more capable and less obtrusive.
For some perspective, I asked Matt Lease, an assistant professor at the University of Texas’ School of Information, what he thinks about the future of wearable technology. Lease has done research on “ubiquitous computing,” with an emphasis on where the virtual and physical worlds are being brought closer together.
Lease is unconvinced that people are going to have devices surgically implanted just to make it easier to check voice mails or send a Tweet. On the other hand, he imagines we’ll continue to see tech like “smart shoes” (say, footwear with sensors that could track your daily walk and beam it to your phone or computer) develop and that there’ll be some interest in gadgets like Google’s forthcoming Project Glass, a set of glasses that can display information about the world around you.
We already have some of that with augmented reality apps on our phones that provide a virtual overlay to the world, like restaurant guides that can point you to nearby grub when you aim your phone’s camera in a certain direction.
But Lease is much more excited about two possibilities: first, what happens when sensors are all around us, changing and improving the environments where we live.
“We can imagine a world not far off where all of our everyday items in our house have cheap sensing, actuation and communication technologies baked into them which our computers monitor and alter our environments in order to better support our activities,” Lease said.
Sensors can detect if we’re in a room and adjust our temperature and lighting, but on a larger scale, they might also prevent bridge collapses or protect small children from in-home dangers.
Of course, Lease says, the benefits won’t come without strings attached; we’ll worry about our privacy and security.
Another change this cheap-sensor revolution could bring is better, more detailed research about ourselves. Lease says he’s excited about the possibilities of crowdsourced data collection that’s now possible with computers (mostly smart phones) that we carry around or wear. The traffic and maps app “Waze,” for instance, collects information from thousands of drivers to create a detailed picture of what’s happening. It does this in the background, with GPS and wireless connectivity, without the need for the user to actively participate.
Whether it’s something we’re wearing that’s changing our life or the environment around us responding to us directly, we’re in for huge changes, a time when even the air itself may be watching and responding.
It’s thrilling or terrifying depending on how you look at it, but then that’s always true of the future.
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DIGITAL SAVANT MICRO: WHAT IS ‘PLACESHIFTING’?
If you record TV shows with a DVR or even on old VHS tapes, you’re familiar with “timeshifting,” or watching programming at a time of your choosing rather than when it’s being broadcast. Placeshifting, on the other hand, means watching TV or movies from a location outside the home.
Watching episodes of “True Blood” while traveling using the “HBO Go” app or catching a live broadcast of a baseball game via a cable or satellite provider’s mobile TV service are examples of this.
The idea of mobile TV viewing has been around a while, but the concept of placeshifting was popularized by a product called the Slingbox, which allows you to access live TV or recorded programming in your home from anywhere in the world as long as you’ve got a good Internet connection on both ends. Sling Media Inc. recently introduced its first new Slingboxes since 2008, the Slingbox 350 and Slingbox 500, to go with its SlingPlayer software, available for a variety of phones, tablets, set-top boxes and on the web.
