When compared to PCs which were introduced in the 70s and remain our primary business computing tool for more than 40 years, computer terminals were largely obsolete by the 80s, making their service life relatively short.
It is time for us to move somewhere else.
The phones look promising. They can connect to cloud resources and provide nearly unlimited additional performance, which rivals PCs of a few years back. They require someone to build out a solution that can bridge the capabilities of a PC and a phone.
This new wave is being driven by Lenovo. The ThinkReality A3 Smart Glasses is my product of the week.
Wearable computers with head-mounted displays were a thing in the early part of the century. The technology was not ready, with poor performance and high carry weights, and the market consolidated in a company that got caught cooking its books. The company and Wearable computers were killed by this last fraud.
In the decades that followed, network performance, and personal area network capabilities all improved.
First movers are usually unsuccessful. IBM created the first smartphone and drove the market adoption of PCs, but is not in either market today. In contrast, second-wave companies like Palm andBlackBerry did very well initially, until Apple came up with a better idea and changed the market dynamics.
They showed a scenario in which a woman wearing a display-less phone on her arm was connected to a variety of devices. She can answer a text on her PC, watch a video on the TV, and use her smart glasses to render images in 3D as she looks at objects. If you register for the event, you can watch a video about it.
Smart glasses will drive this solution into the future as they can see what she is looking at and provide additional information through object and image recognition.
The idea of moving from device to device is very compelling. I have a TV in my office, but I don't like watching videos on my computer screen because it takes too much time. If the videos migrated to the TV automatically when I looked at it and made a selection, I would be able to watch them on the best device for videos.
There is an ongoing problem with digital assistants waking up on words from unrelated conversations. They will only respond when you are looking at them. They are inactive to address some of the privacy concerns surrounding these products.
The connection between the devices could be part of a two-factor solution to prevent people outside of your home from giving you commands. If you aren't connected to the device through your computer, it will reject the command
I saw what the future of the PC may be last week. Not one or the other, but a collective whole that is potentially greater than the sum of the parts, defining an innovative future where our devices cooperate to provide a vastly more compelling experience.
The platform will need to learn some of the objects, but early on, I expect this learning to be light. As more and more people use the solution, it should get richer and be able to connect objects to their related data.
The screen size is one of the limitations of small laptops. I use a 49-inch monitor as my primary display, I don't like using the smaller laptop screen when I travel, and there is no way I'd ever be able to work off a phone or tablets.
I used a similar set of glasses 20 years ago, but without all the features and with a lower resolution. Those costs more than $21K for me. They are excellent for everything from working on documents with a seemingly larger virtual screen to watching movies or playing video games.
I took the Sony glasses to a party and the people lined up to use them. The ThinkRealty glasses are more affordable and have more features, making them a good option for many of us.
Since those Sony glasses, the ThinkReality A3 Smart Glasses are the first to approach an accurate head-mounted display. The ThinkRealty A3 Smart Glasses are my product of the week because of their importance to the future of Wearable Personal Computing.
References:
2. Ready For
3. here
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