Future of Wearables
2013 was a great year for tech. Just about everyone had a smartphone, social media was becoming the very nucleus of the internet, grassroots celebrities from YouTube and Vine were becoming some of the most famous people on Earth, tech funding was high, and experimentation was rife.
Diane von Furstenberg Spring 2013. Courtesy of GoRunway
Slap bang in the middle of all this tech fervour, a very special product was released: Google Glass.
Why Special?
Companies have attempted wearable tech many times in the past. We had tools like pedometers, heart rate sensors, and digital watches, but they were all simplistic and low-powered, running on hardware from industries that didn’t cater to the puny miniature tech market. After 2007, when making and selling smartphones became one of the biggest businesses in the world, the need for high power in very small boxes was paramount. Miniaturisation became a key specialisation within hardware companies. Six years on, Google released a little strip of plastic containing a battery, a camera, touch sensors, a processor, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips, and a projector aimed at a glass prism screen.
It was a shocking achievement, and though I’ve never worn it, many reviewers testified to its ahead-of-our-time user experience. Despite the positive sentiment towards the engineering, the product as a whole was roundly rebuked for being weird-looking, embarrassing to wear, functionally limited, and invasive of others’ privacy.
“Weird looking and invasive”
I think the biggest issue with tech adoption is that we want two conflicting things out of them:
We want wearable tech to be discreet, beautiful, and unthreatening.
We want to know when someone is wearing one and what it does.
To wear a piece of tech, we want it to be discreet, even unnoticeable, but on others, we want it to be obvious and honest. This seems like an unsolvable problem, but actually, it isn’t.
Watches get it right
Smartwatches are a pretty special case. They manage to straddle the 5-way conflict of being discreet, noticeable, non-threatening, beautiful, and having obvious functionality. This was only achievable because classic wristwatches conquered the “wrist” a hundred years ago and did all of the hard slog of becoming culturally accepted. Taking one watch and substituting it for a little screen that looks like a watch isn’t so hard to swallow. A covered wrist is normal. Glancing at a watch is a traditional custom. Smartwatches slipped into regular life quite easily. We all see your wristwatch, but at the same time, we ignore it completely. It handles the non-threatening requirement nicely too because we understand that all of its sensors are reading the wearer instead of us. All smartwatches are like this. The ones that experimented with cameras have gone away. So it turns out that precedent is important. If a piece of fashion has already become accepted, a tech substitute is more likely to be adopted.
Now, let’s now take a look at two bits of wearable tech, one that succeeded in adoption, and one that didn’t.
Earphones
This was an entirely new category - tech that appeared to almost drain out of your ears into a music player. In my opinion, even the wireless ones aren’t pretty, but it had such lifestyle-changing utility that adoption was inevitable.
Screenshot from “Technologic”, one of Apple’s famous iPod silhouette adverts, 2004
It helped that earphones gave a very personal, intimate experience, with all the business happening right down your own ear canal. Who could object? I’ll quickly say a word about travel headphones. These precede earphones, and users tend to care more about the way they look. But today, headphones are uncommon to see in public, whereas earphones are omnipresent.
VR/AR headsets
These are - as Steve Jobs said: “headphones for the eyes”. They isolate and create an interactive visual scape for the user. These have seen some adoption in homes, but almost never in public, and it’s not hard to see why. God, where do we begin? They’re threatening with an array of outward-facing sensors. We don’t know when we’re being seen or what we’re intruding on. They are as indiscreet as can be. And anything that conceals a person’s eyes cannot be beautiful in contrast to what’s being concealed. This piece of wearable tech fails at just about every hurdle, except that it’s really cool to use.
Tech Tips
Simply put, be useful, first. Aim all of the sensors at the wearer, second. Be beautiful, third. Be discreet, fourth. Let people plainly see what it is doing, fifth. And if it can replace an existing piece of clothing, that’s handy.
