Pete Hardie wrote: > Bill Nordstrom wrote: > > Mainly I want to combine the > > 1. A mobile phone too bad we can't make a pentium card and a cellular modem card pretend that they're a normal cell phone. > > 2. A walkman- a necessity in my view. that's what a cdrom drive and lots of flash memory are for. blast the cd into flash and play out of that to save batteries. > > 3. Organizer > > 4. Address/phonebook > > 6. Memo pad software. or are you suggesting a scribblepad velcro'd to your arm and you use a stylus. maybe there's a resurrection for the Newton in the future...? > > 5. Maps gps card unless you get a cellphone with gps built in. i'd heard rumors they exist... > > This parallels my recent thoughts on this, but add in > 7. pager good call... not only can you use it for personal announcements, use it to receive important bits of data from your other computers. i seem to recall reading somewhere about pcmcia pager cards and new protocols that transmit 8 bits, not 7. > I know that the digital cell phones usually have this capability, but > until digital service is the norm, pagers are useful. (side note, are there > PC/104 compatible boards that will receive pager and/or cellular signals, > and drop them into the text/audio paths? get a pager, rip it open, tap it's discriminator, run that through some hi-gain, low noise op-amp (i use analog devices products) and pipe that into a spare serial port. there is software available to decode pages. the reason you tap the pager discriminator is so that you can watch multiple pagers. this would be useful in a hospital, for example... the respiratory therapist could keep an eye on eachother so optimal dispatch happens without 1) overloading the operator or 2) crowding the elevators all going to the same person. i've seen both happen. > > As I see it, the emphasis on HMD in the wearable community is stifling the > > emergence of this crucial product. I don't know many people that are > I disagree - the HMD stuff has been mostly for a *text* HMD - the P4 as > Grail. i second that. i am not planning on a lot of graphics processing. i basically want text overlays for augmented reality, and i'll close my other eye if i have some typing i have to do. as dumb as this sounds, i still think the virtualboy has promise. yes it's red display is a bit annoying, but if you use just one driver, you'll have red overlays and the black won't be visible. aside from the fact that 24*80 is standard terminal size, why not just pick whatver screen and font size feels right? furthermore, i think that a display driver should be written to allow for different resolutions. i'm thinking that you can supply number of pixels and let it pick the font and screen size. if you want to try a different device, re-run the driver and it'll reformat the outgoing data for a new device. which reminds me, is there some standard for HMD video interfaces, or is it a choice between a pseudo-VGA or character stream? > I don't want to need to remember to look into a lens to see if my email > is answered, or have an open flat LCD (privacy), and sometimes an audio > alert (or Steve Mann's electro-shock alerts) is not good either. An HMD > allows for a private, visual alert. yup... a visual alert is no good if it's not in front of your eyes. well at least for some things. my first pager had a red blinky light as well as a beeper and vibrator, and it was useless, because i'd not know if i'd been paged unless one of the other alers went off or i'd been looking at the thing. > If I'm going somewhere and need directions or a map, I'd prefer not to > have to stop and look into a device, then resume my journey - I want to have > them 'at my eyeball-tips' so I can navigate and keep on track. the other reason i'm thinking of reusing virtualboy hardware is that it seems to be pretty good with polygons. i may be out to lunch on this one, but if we're putting video over whatever it is that we are really seeing, don't we want the simplest overlay? i'm imagining sort of a 'terminator' style overlay. it's quiet until you get a page or a fax or an email, whereupon it blinks a little indicator. it's nice an private and not excessively intrusive. as an example if i'm driving, i want to hook this into my car's systems and display my speed, temperature, gas and odometer. without having to look away
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