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.
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.
