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TECHnalysis Research Guest Column
March 5, 2014 Smartwatches like Pebble Steel, smart glasses like Google Glass and smart bracelets like FitBit Fuel offer a view into the future, where technology is seamlessly embedded into our lives. In many ways, it's an appealing concept, conjuring up science fiction-like visions of augmented reality, immediate anytime anywhere access to information, and even advanced medicine. But the current realities of the market and its products fall far short of this ideal, on many different levels. Plus, there are enormous social and even ethical questions when it comes to wearables, but that's a topic for another day. Two of the biggest challenges facing wearable device makers are also two of the most basic: How much should a wearable device do and how should it look? Of course, the answer that many in the technology industry would provide to the first question is, as much as possible. Tech gadgets like smartphones and tablets offer an enormous range of capabilities and so it seems logical, at one level, to extend that thinking to the "next generation" of devices. The second question is tougher, because here we delve into the very subjective realm of style and fashion. Wearables bring questions of design to a level that's orders of magnitude beyond anything the technology industry has ever faced. Think about it. Wearables are more like clothing than gadgets and there are literally millions of clothing designs to meet people's varying fashion tastes. The closest thing in technology is probably the variety of smartphone cases — but imagine if all those case varieties were only produced by the few vendors in the world who can build smartphones — that's a huge problem. An even bigger issue is the inevitable desire to merge fashion and function — to create something that looks cool and does lots of cool stuff. At first glance, that would seem to be the smart way to go. But the more I study this market, the more I realize it's a fool's errand. The demands of creating something people want to wear on a regular basis — the fashion side — are extraordinarily difficult to balance with interface and connectivity demands from the functionality side. Instead, I believe the winning products will specifically choose one path or the other: high function devices that look stylish but aren't uniquely fashionable ("smart wearables"); or very simple devices, produced in small quantities with many varieties, which offer only modest functionality ("connected wearables"). Wearing a device on your body provides a whole new realm of potential interactions that are only beginning to be explored and that is where even simple connected wearables could prove to be appealing. Eventually, fashion and function will come together. But we'll need some significant improvements in human interface technology before they do. In the meantime, I think it's wise to focus on one side or the other. Here's a link to the original column: http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2014/03/05/smart-wearables-fashion-function/6078735/
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