Why Wearable Technology is the Future?

(This story is written by a college kid about another kid who dropped out of college. Sorry if you don't find the story interesting.)

When Nelson Zhang and I met in Shanghai last summer, he had already made up his mind to drop out of Cal. With $100,000 Thiel Fellowship money in hand, Nelson was free to spend the next two years on his hardware startup. Nelson won the fellowship with his invention of a 3-D printer that sped up hardware startups’ prototyping and iteration process. 

According to Nelson, his startup would focus on wearable products, the really hot tech area encompassing Pebble, iWatch and Google Glass.

In fact, Nelson has been developing a Google Glass imitator called Prism since his senior year of high school. His team revamped the third generation of Prism in the YCombinator hardware hackathon this year. The new Prism can detect nodding and head shaking, and it enables users to take photos and upload them to Facebook with a few subtle head movements.

Last summer, Nelson planned to visit manufacturers in Shenzhen, Hongkong and Taiwan. His goal was twofold: to learn about the manufacturing capacity of and technology available to the manufacturers; and to ask for advice so as to finish his final product design.

I asked him one question that was hotly debated: why wearable technology is the future? Here’s his answer.

First of all, from the standpoint of a hardware engineer, Nelson sees an obvious trend that the size of wearable devices is becoming increasingly small. ten years or even five years ago, Google Glass was impossible. Hardware-device size was simply too huge.

The “father of wearable computing”, Professor Steve Mann developed a head mounted device in the 1980s that looked like a helmet. Except for Mann himself, no one would wear the device in public. Fortunately, Google Glass has achieved a size as small as a normal pair of glasses, which solves the problem of privacy. When wearable devices are small enough, they become less cumbersome and easier for everyone to adopt.

From the point of view of a consumer, there is only one reason one would use any wearable device: convenience. Take your phone as an example. On one hand, there is an access time to use the phone. It takes two seconds to take a phone out of your pocket. On the other hand, when you are using a phone, you devote all of your attention to it. There is nothing you can do but stare at your phone.

In comparison, Google Glass is always there, and it’s always on. Google Glass integrates much better with your visual sense than a phone—it seems to be the natural extension of your eyes and does not prevent you from doing something else.

This leads to a number of possibilities. Most directly, Google Glass enables every user to take photos or watch videos at any second.

Indirectly, QR codes have been introduced for very long time but have never been popularized. One major reason is that scanning QR codes with a cellphone is extremely inconvenient. You have to take the phone out of your pocket and turn on the app before you scan. This process is short and easy but not convenient. 

However, with Google Glass, all you need to do is stare at the QR code. Google Glass would scan it in a split second. By eliminating the inconvenience of scanning QR codes, Google Glass could boost the popularization of the codes, which in turn would open up a lot more possibilities.