Ubiquitous Computing
Alignment to Moore's law, computing power / memory are getting smaller and cheaper year by year. Technology has creeped into everyone's life... gone were the days where only tech savvy individuals whom are masters of computer program could interact with computing devices via a keyboard and programming platform. These days, devices can be commanded via voice...and now they understand human language!
Users no longer need to know the complexity of search engines, location-based tracking, "Siri, I want to eat pizza for dinner, tell me where are the pizza outlets around me"
Instantaneously, SIRI acknowledge / understands the request, she retrieves your current location via GP, crawls through the web and locate pizza restaurant within 3km radius around you and displays it onto your mobile phone ! AMAZING !
SIRI removes the cognitive load of going thru different internet webpages, geographical analysis. She can even provide recommendations if you let her check the reviews on Yelp. It is so easy to use, as long as you have a voice, you would be able to engage SIRI services!
Other than performing searches on the internet, SIRI can relate to your applications as she retrieves your chat history, photo history, play your playlist at your request.
SIRI now sits snugly within inch-scale devices like our mobile phones, they can perform computing and communications. I am a believer of the law of equilibrium, technology serves as a double edge sword. It is like everybody has a personal assistant / secretary if you think positive, OR every of your whims and fancies, decisions and actions are always being tracked.
Wearing Your Devices
Other than talking to a digital device, taking a step further, how about wearing it and bringing it everywhere. My childhood days have this wearable device, Saiyan Tracker... it was a glimpse into the future where actual world is augmented by assessment of individual combat power values and also ability to provide geo-spatial details.
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So when the google glasses was announced, i thought my childhood's coming true!
I guess it failed to gain traction with its initial high prices, lack of use cases / applications. It seemed to be too ahead of their time.
But what I loved about it was that it was a great interface to augment the interaction of a user with his/her environment. The glasses does not mask / cover the existing environment, which means users can still observe or relate to whats happening in real time. The information that is "pasted" into user's vision (or even voice in the future or vibration for notification) serves as additional medium that the device can interact with the wearer.
Maybe the design / fashion wasn't the immediate consideration when developing the device.... which could be a factor to the low adoption rate too. But what I really thought was that the applications and users are still in the infancy stage for such wearables. I do believe as technology continues the climb, we will find further uses or even compliment wearable with other equipment (mobile phones, electronic appliances) as the world becomes more connected... Watch out for 5G is coming to connect us!
But I heard that Apple is coming up with a similar product ! Hopefully they can do better !
