Seiko Instruments, a division of Seiko, has developed a prototype watch (and a decent looking one at that) which connects to the mobile phone via Bluetooth. Codenamed CPC TR-006, the watch displays information from your cell phone that would otherwise require the person to reach in his or her pocket i.e. network signal strength, battery condition.
The watch also alerts you whenever your cellphone receives a call, an SMS or e-mail messages by vibrating or playing a preset ringtone. It also has caller ID, so all you need to do is glance at your wrist and you can see who is calling or who sent you a message.
In addition, you may adjust your cellphone’s ringtone volume through the watch’s interface. The watch is scheduled to be released by late 2006 / early 2007.
Jumping Jack Flash is a prototype watch by an award winning Design firm, Xefirostarch, that compresses time in terms of technology by utilizing the most essential condition of tracking - movement and displacement. The metronome arm, a reinvention of the hourglass, combines physical movement with digital display and marks the passing of time through its hourly rotation and the reconfiguration of the interior component or bubbles. The time of the day appears as a luminescent projection on on the interior face of the arm, through the LED display wired into the bubbles. Multiple simultaneous scalar conditions of movement produce the effect of a hybridized digital-mechanical environment.
Put together a nationwide competition where you ask emerging innovators to depict the future of seamless mobility, and you are bound to have a scenario or two where the wristwatch retains its mantle as the interface of choice. Take the MOTOFWRD competition for example, one of their finalist enteries involves a swiss army equivalent gadget that combines your phone, GPS system, credit card and pda into one special inteface that combines a specially-equipped glasses and a wristwatch. (Read in Detail (PDF))
The Sundial Watch created by Artist Amy Franceschini of the design colllective, Future farmers, is a reactionary sculpture to the ubiquity of technological devices in our daily lives. Amy hopes that her watch will remind us of what we are leaving behind - our reliance on nature for our Swiss Army gadgets. She intends it as a reminder to depend on nature because while our technological crutches may break down, the sun, on the other hand, will always rise in the morning and set in the evening, and the length of the winter days will always be shorter than the summer days. (More Photos)
Seasoned Inventor Greg E. Blonder writes in about his concept watch called the “About Time” that does away with accuracy and only tells “approximate” time. “Most of the Swiss producers look somewhat askance when you suggest a watch that tells only *approximate* time”, he writes in. Digital precision, according to him, is not only unnecessary but a disadvantage. A more human time scale is an approximate phrase like “It’s about 1 pm” instead of a 12:58 am. “Digital watches make it all too easy to miss a meeting believing it is closer to noon than to one.” he adds. So instead of showing the accurate time, the About Time LCD displays the nearest hour in the center of the watch i.e. It’s about 1pm, It’s Around 6 o’clock, Slight After 3, Nearly 5 fourty five. etc.
The watch isn’t available commercially yet, but Greg hopes to have it out soon. When I first received this in my email, I sent Greg a link to a similar watch by Fossil to which he replied: “That’s disturbing, because I contacted Fossil twice about a license 4 years ago. But, as far as I can tell, the Gehry watch still displays “exact” time, just with phrases. My watch displays “approximate time”, with a wide variety of words and colloquialisms. As does the linear display- the idea is to break the tyranny of rigid time- “”its about half past 10″, rather than “27 past 10″.
Newsweek Magazine files in a report about the potential of body based technology that allows the human body to act as a wireless networking tool. This very technology is central to Docomo’s concept wristwatch-phone that transfers the voice signal through your body:
In his gadget-filled office at Tokyo Medical and Dental University, Prof. Kohji Mitsubayashi tells a visitor to touch a transmitter with one hand and a receiver with another. Voila! A jaunty TV jingle blares from a pair of attached speakers. Surprised, the visitor releases both gadgets, and the music stops. The simplicity and strangeness of becoming a human circuit—with electrical signals coursing through one’s body from fingertip to fingertip—is so fascinating that visitors usually repeat the act. “Fun, isn’t it?” says Mitsubayashi, grinning.
Not just fun. Japan is abuzz over the potential of such body-based technology as the ultimate wireless networking tool. A string of Japanese companies are experimenting with systems that use the human body to conduct electricity—some manipulating weak currents that pass through the skin itself (as body-fat scales do), others taking advantage of electrical fields on the surface of the body. Associated products are on the way. The question is whether this represents a paradigm shift in the way we think about wires.
As time telling becomes more ubiquitous thanks to personal technologies like the cell phone, it makes it easy to see why naysayers predict the death of the wrist watch as a utilitarian object but what they don’t realise is that as technology takes us over the next curve, watches might just begin to tell us more than just time. Below are some of the “Care” bracelets that have been announced recently:
- Radio frequency wristwear for runaway autistic children (Gm News)
- A wristwatch-like device that can monitor whether patients have been complying with their treatment regimen (This Business Gazette)
- And of course heart-rate montiors - Julie Deardorff of Chicago Times writes: “The fascination with heart-rate monitors reached new heights after the Outdoor Life Network showed the pulse of some riders in the Tour de France in July. It’s like having a cockpit view of an auto racer’s instrument panel.” (Baltimore Sun)
Move over Quartz. Physicists at the California Institute of Technology have created an alternative to the quartz movement - a disk (made of silica and the size of less than the width of a human hair) that vibrates steadily like a tuning fork (vibrates about 80 million times per second) when it is pumped with laser light (photon), which is very similar to the quartz crystal’s vibration from electrical current that helps regulate a battery powered wristwatch.
However, the only clear difference between the optically driven movement and the electric quartz is the design element that could provide new electro-optic functions withint the context of integrated circuits. This is the first micro-mechanical device that has been operated at a steady frequency by the actions of photons alone.
While we’ve previously mentioned the emergence of a fashion contender to the watch - the cellphone, a new report titled “Fashion and Style in the Mobile Handset Industry” by an independent research firm, ARCchart, points out some interesting trends:
- Fashion boutiques have already started taking on handsets. So far we’ve had the Vertu, Siemens/ESCADA, Nokia/Versace and the now defunct Xelibri. In addition, fashion designers such as Kimora Lee Simmons, Diane Von Furstenberg, Anna Sui and Vivienne Westwood have readily extended their design expertise onto handsets from Motorola and Samsung.
- Currently the fashion and style strategies employed by major handsets are: the incorporation of fashion and styling elements across a handset portfolio; co-branding collaborations with fashion brands; formation of a handset sub-portfolio geared specifically at the fashion and style conscious market; and the establishment of independent, fashion focused handset subsidiaries. Nokia is the only vendor adopting all four strategies, while Sony Ericsson employs just one.
- Finally, here’s a clue on how much cellphone companies are placeing their bets on phones over taking the wrist watch market, ArcCharts based its forcast of 23 million fashion handsets by 2010 by mapping consumer purchasing behaviour in the wrist watch market onto a future, mature handset market.
Looks like I might be covering more than wrists in the future.
Seasoned Inventor Greg E. Blonder writes in about his concept watch called the “About Time” that does away with accuracy and only tells “approximate” time. “Most of the Swiss producers look somewhat askance when you suggest a watch that tells only *approximate* time”, he writes in. Digital precision, according to him, is not only unnecessary but a disadvantage. A more human time scale is an approximate phrase like “It’s about 1 pm” instead of a 12:58 am. “Digital watches make it all too easy to miss a meeting believing it is closer to noon than to one.” he adds. So instead of showing the accurate time, the About Time LCD displays the nearest hour in the center of the watch i.e. It’s about 1pm, It’s Around 6 o’clock, Slight After 3, Nearly 5 fourty five. etc.
