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Real-Time Health Monitoring is the Purpose of Wearable Computers

Posted on March 18, 2019 by admin Posted in Hardware, Medical, User Interface Leave a comment

What it is: The “killer” app for the Apple Watch is real-time health monitoring.

When the Apple Watch first appeared, critics dismissed it as a gimmick. That’s because even Apple couldn’t define a specific use for the Apple Watch at first.

The whole purpose of technology is to solve a problem that was too difficult or impossible to solve previously. The PC made computers accessible to more people beyond the mainframe and minicomputer users. What made the PC useful was the spreadsheet, first embodied by VisiCalc and then by Lotus 1-2-3. People bought PCs specifically to use spreadsheets.

When the iPhone first came out, it represented a giant improvement over existing mobile phones, but also gave you a computer in your pocket. Combined with mobile location tracking, the iPhone defined how smartphones work, which eventually led to location tracking services like ride-sharing services.

The Apple Watch first appeared with no specific purpose in mind, but the latest Stanford study indicates that the Apple Watch does a decent job detecting heart abnormalities. To detect this usually requires expensive equipment at a doctor’s office, but the Apple Watch is bringing this capability to the masses. That makes real-time health monitoring the real killer app for wearable computers.

If you’re concerned about your health, then the Apple Watch is for you. For people who still refuse to buy and use a wearable computer like the Apple Watch, they’re essentially telling the world that they either can’t afford a wearable computer or they don’t think their life is worth a few hundred dollars.

The next step for wearable computers will be health enhancement. That can come with smart glasses that enhance a user’s vision while also tracking health conditions at the same time. Real-time health monitoring and enhancement is the ultimate goal of wearable computers.

Apple’s Augmented Reality Smart Glasses Project

Posted on March 7, 2019 by admin Posted in Business, Hardware, User Interface Leave a comment

What it is: Apple filed more patents for smart glass wearable computers.

Two years ago, Apple acquired an eye-tracking company called SensoMotoric Instruments. The company’s Eye Tracking Glasses were capable of recording a person’s natural gaze behavior in real-time and in real world situations with a sampling rate up to 120Hz. A YouTube video that has since been removed showed how an athlete could wear such smart glasses to evaluate their performance.

Now Apple has recently filed patents for cooling smart glasses by blowing air to cool the user’s head, making the smart glasses more comfortable to wear for long periods of time.

Perhaps one of the more interesting patent filings is eye tracking to monitor the distance between the lenses and the display assembly and the user’s eyes. This could detect the relative motion of the headset to the eyes to produce a more accurate visual experience when in motion. That’s likely where SensoMotoric Instrument’s eye-tracking technology is being used.

If you want to see the future of Apple, simply look at which companies they’ve acquired. When Apple acquired Metaio’s augmented reality technology, it was obvious they would eventually release augmented reality technology, which later appeared as ARKit.

While ARKit is limited to iOS devices, augmented reality is really suited for wearable smart glasses. Hence the future of ARKit is learning to develop apps for Apple’s smart glasses.

That requires learning the Swift programming language first, and ARKit second. When Apple releases smart glasses, they’ll likely expand ARKit’s capabilities to include eye-tracking. That means developers will soon be in demand to create smart glass apps as yet another spin-off from iOS like watchOS and tvOS.

If you want to profit from the future, you can’t go wrong learning to develop apps in ARKit.

To learn more about Apple’s smart glasses patents, click here.

Another Augmented Reality Patent by Apple

Posted on February 26, 2019 by admin Posted in Business, Hardware, User Interface Leave a comment

What it is: Apple filed another patent for augmented reality that hints of its future plans.

Augmented reality is already a part of iOS devices like the iPhone and iPad. While augmented reality hasn’t yet become commonly used like location tracking (for getting rides through services like Uber) on the iPhone or real-time health monitoring on the Apple Watch, augmented reality is coming in the form of smart glasses.

Apple’s latest patent highlights how augmented reality could track the location of interesting objects and transpose that information when you walk near it. For outdoor use, this could help you find directions while for indoor use, this could help you find the location of your iPhone or iPad.

Like most patents, this may never become part of a real product, but it shows what Apple is thinking about and where augmented reality will be heading. It will start with the iPhone and iPad and gradually when it becomes more useful, it will migrate to smart glasses. Apple will likely test the concepts for augmented reality on iOS devices. Then when the most practical purpose appears, Apple will introduce smart glasses.

What most companies are doing now is releasing smart glasses and then hoping people will find a use for them, which is backwards thinking. These companies should be thinking of what pressing problem smart glasses can solve and then build smart glasses optimized to solve that particular problem.

Augmented reality is a growing field and will only improve with each passing year. That means augmented reality will become commonplace soon but only when it can solve problems that can’t be solved easily with todays’ technology.

How to Fold a Smartphone

Posted on February 22, 2019 by admin Posted in Hardware, User Interface Leave a comment

What it is: Foldable smartphones are the future, but which way should they bend?

Samsung recently announced their Galaxy Fold smartphone which bends vertically down the middle from top to bottom and unfolds like a book.

While interesting, the Galaxy Fold is also expensive ($1,980) which will limit it to early adopters while Samsung improves on its design. However if you look at the above two pictures, you can see there are two ways to fold a smartphone.

Samsung Galaxy Fold bends vertically while Apple has filed patents for a smartphone that bends in half or in thirds, but bends horizontally. It may not seem like much of a big deal, but from a technical point of view, it makes a huge difference.

The crease where the phone bends will exhibit repeated stress from opening and bending over and over. That means that hinge is the single most likely point of failure where failure could range from outright breaking to simply affecting the visual quality of the screen in that hinge area.

That’s why a vertical bend (like the Samsung Galaxy Fold) may look good, but creates a large stress area from top to bottom. On the other hand, a horizontal bend mimics the old style flip phones and creates a much smaller crease.

Assuming both creases fail at the same rate, the vertical fold displays the largest point of failure while the horizontal fold displays a far smaller area of failure.

The more area that could fail, the more likely it will fail. That makes the vertical crease the least reliable option from an engineering point of view.

If a phone bends in thirds, that creates two areas of potential failure, which roughly doubles its chance of failure over a phone that bends in half. Therefore a phone that bends in half like a flip phone is probably the best design to minimize stress on the foldable screen.

The hardest part about a foldable screen is making sure the creased area displays images as sharp from day one over the lifetime of the phone, which is typically 2 – 4 years. If creases become noticeable over time, then the foldable phone becomes less valuable solely due to the screen deterioration.

Foldable screens are the future, but the technology must catch up to the point where a screen can bend multiple times over years without ever affecting the visual quality of the screen. When this happens, foldable phones will become the norm. Until then, large screen non-bendable phones will continue to dominate but fade away over time.

To learn more about Apple’s patent filings for foldable phones, click here.

The Foldable Phone

Posted on February 20, 2019 by admin Posted in Business, Hardware, User Interface Leave a comment

What it is: Samsung announced a foldable phone that acts as both a smartphone and a tablet.

Samsung announced the Galaxy Fold, a $1,980 smartphone that folds open to provide a 7.3-inch screen that’s comparable to a mini-tablet. While Samsung isn’t the first company to announce a foldable phone, they’re the first major company to do so.

The future of smartphones are foldable phones. As smartphones keep getting bigger, the larger screen makes them difficult to carry easily. Carrying a tablet with a smartphone isn’t practical for most people, so it’s easier just to lug around a large screen smartphone instead.

While the Samsung Galaxy Fold looks impressive, its price is far too high for most people, which will limit its adoption. Having the most advanced technology in the world is useless if people can’t afford to buy them.

If any computer company wanted to sell the fastest computer in the world, it’s easy to build a supercomputer. It’s far more difficult to get more than a handful of people to buy them to make it profitable enough to manufacture.

The Samsung Galaxy Fold is simply a marketing gimmick to lay claim to one of the first foldable smartphones on the market. That’s no different than being one of the first makers of MP3 players or one of the first makers of Blu-ray disc players. It’s nice to be first to offer advanced technology, but what ultimately matters is whether people will use it or not.

Apple is likely developing a foldable phone as well, but they won’t release it until the price comes down. Just as large screen smartphones were once considered luxuries, but are now considered normal, so will foldable smartphones change form luxuries to ordinary items within a few years.

Until that time, the Galaxy Fold will remain an interesting product that was too far ahead of its time to achieve mass adoption. Of course the goal of the Galaxy Fold isn’t to sell many units but to lay claim as one of the first foldable smartphones.

That’s a nice claim to have, but ultimately it’s a meaningless one. Anyone remember the first smartphone that came with a touch screen? (It wasn’t the iPhone.) If nobody remembers the first smartphone with a touch screen, a few years from now, will anyone remember the Galaxy Fold?

Maybe, maybe not. In either case, nobody will buy the Galaxy Fold until the price comes down and the technology becomes cheaper to manufacture. Sometimes being first isn’t an advantage after all.

To learn more about the Galaxy Fold, click here.

Apple Acquires Voice Assistant Startup

Posted on February 17, 2019 by admin Posted in Business, Programming, Software Leave a comment

What it is: Apple acquired Pullstring, a company that lets users create and publish voice-activated apps.

Siri sucks. Despite introducing the world to voice assistants, Siri has constantly lagged behind Amazon’s Alexa. Now Apple is working to fix Siri buy acquiring a company called Pullstring, which lets users create and publish voice-activated apps.

Pullstring’s website claims that their Converse program lets you “Build your conversation visually.” By defining conversation blocks and customizing them, you can define a user’s experience through your voice application.

Instead of dealing with code, Pullstring’s Converse program lets you focus on the overall picture while letting Pullstring’s program take care of the actual voice recognition details. Beyond letting people create voice-activated apps for Siri (and improving Siri’s popularity), Pullstring’s technology will also let developers (hopefully) add voice-activated features to ordinary apps as a supplement.

Right now, Apple offers SiriKit, which lets you add Siri to your apps, but SiriKit is limited to specific domains such as messaging or payments. You can’t customize Siri beyond a limited range of domains that Siri can understand.

Pullstring promises to avoid this and allow developers to creatively add voice recognition to any app simply and easily. This will allow developers to create games that allow voice control in addition to touch control.

For HomePod, Pullstring’s technology allows users to customize Siri on HomePod to allow voice control programming in a simple manner.

Pullstring’s technology likely won’t appear in Apple’s technology any time soon, but expect it to show up in around three years as Apple integrates Pullstring’s technology into their own software framework.

Pullstring’s acquisition is a major one much like Apple’s acquisition of Metaio, which introduced augmented reality. Pullstring will introduce then world to voice-activated programming and app development, and could be as important as Apple’s original HyperCard in letting people create custom programs.

All we have to do is wait a few years to see what happens, but when Apple introduces voice-activated coding, nobody should be surprised.

To learn more about Pullstring, click here.