The Globe and Mail has an interesting interview with Microsoft Principal Researcher Bill Buxton. There is a hint that the next big thing, which everyone will have, may not be a genius phone but an incredibly smarter watch?Buxton played a chief role on the team that invented the multi-touch user interface in 1984.
He refers to a watch which came out in 1984 made by Casio. It cost less than $100. 1984 was the same year that the first Macintosh was released. "And this watch had a touch screen on it. And that touch screen had a character recognizer built into it....It was fantastic."
Now the wonder of computer technology is related to "Moore’s Law that says the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 18 months. Well that watch was more than 17 Moore’s Laws ago. That means that more than 136,000 times the computing power is available today than there was for the chip the size of the one that was in that watch in 1984. It’s phenomenal."
The trouble is most people don't wear watches anymore:
"This is staggering for me. It’s a generational thing. I’m 61. Four years ago I was talking in a group about how phones were just going to disappear and we’re all just going to have smart watches. There were a couple of 20-something people at my table and they said, Bill, you just don’t understand... And then we found out that of the ten people at the table only two of us had watches. We were at this banquet and there were ten tables in total. I said, okay, we’re going to do a study right now. We went out—and keep in mind these were propellerheads spanning generations—and on average there were only two-and-a-half or three people out of each table of ten who were wearing watches. It’s a fun activity. Do it yourself. Just look around one day and see how many people in your office are wearing watches.
So people have just replaced their watches with mobile phones. Now, if you did a spectacular watch maybe you could change that…"
Are you ready for a renaissance in cutting edge computer watches?
