The Size of Watches

With the advent of the new Apple watch and various earlier versions by other manufacturers, wearable technology is getting a foothold.

This started me thinking and in my opinion it will not be long before it will be socially acceptable to wear a full size smartphone on your lower arm.

This will then lead to the obvious enhancement of being able to rotate the phone so it is vertical or horizontal and all those health and fitness monitoring devices will be built right in to the back of the phone.

I'm not sure if the self destruct feature from the film Predator will make it in to many phones.

3D Printed Car

Some thoughts that resulted from a conversation over dinner with friends.

We were talking about Land Rovers and replacing or welding inner wings that have rusted.  The outer wing bolts on but the inner needs welding.

It would be much easier if cars clicked together like Lego bricks.

As children my brother and I deliberately made cars out of Lego as strong as possible and smashed them together.  The winner was the car that survived the longest.  Based on those early 'scientific' experiments I reckon that Lego would be strong enough to make a full sized car.

I have no idea how heavy it would be but that got me thinking.

Why are cars a shell of thin metal.  Why not make cars out of solid sections with a light weight interior.

That is exactly how 3D printers create solid objects with the minimum amount of plastic.  The insides are a hollow honey comb type structure with a solid skin.

At the moment low cost 3D printers are too small to make a body section for a full sized car but the parts could be made to intersect like a jigsaw or clip together like Lego.  How great would it be if, when you had a dent or something broke, you just printed out a replacement section.

It adds all sorts of possibilities.  Cars could be made with weaker and lighter components knowing that if a bit breaks off you just print out a new one.

I expect there are loads of other possibilities if the starting point is not pressed steel.

Just my thoughts for the morning.

==

Update:
3D printers are large enough now to print houses and boats. They are often used on car parts.

==

Leap Motion and the Future

It's not often that I get excited about new technology.  I work in IT so I should be a gadget geek but to me most are just obvious innovations or toys that won't make a significant difference however sometimes a new thing just opens up a world of possibilities.  I think the Leap is one of those.

This is a sensor that detects detailed hand movement to control a computer.

http://leapmotion.com/

If it works as well as they claim then in my opinion this will change how we control lots of things.  It should make touch screens obsolete.  It could be used in cars, for your cooker, light switches, your TV, for phones for games...

There are so many obvious innovations that come out of it.

The Future

The first change I hope to use would be a keyboard and mouse free desk.  The keyboard could be replaced by anything, just a bit of paper with the letters on would be enough.  The cursor movement could just follow your finger so the mouse is no longer necessary.

I can't help leaping (pun intended) ahead to the next obvious stage.  That will be for 3D screens to project a 3D keyboard.  You can then type on moving or static 3D images of the keys from a keyboard.  They could move as you press them.  I am sure you could even get audible and perhaps one day tactile feedback using focused or inaudible low frequency sound or something else that activates the nerve endings (a bit Sci-Fi here).

Some of this is a bit difficult at the moment.  I think projecting 3D in to mid air is still tricky at a price any of us are prepared to pay.  It would need some low cost method of lasers interacting with each other to produce visible light in mid air.  I don't know how existing 3D screens work.  I assume the most obvious would be to have a gas or particles to project against.  I am not sure if anyone has anything reacting with air.  I am sure people cleverer than I have already though of all these possible solutions.

All those ideas just from one new device.

Anyway, back to my point, this little thing opens up a world of possibilities.

I pre-ordered mine months ago.

==

Update:
This was very disappointing. Its use was too limited to be of any use.
I'm pretty sure that this type of interface will have its place at some time in the future but it's not there yet.

==

Auto Synchronised Memory Sticks

I just bought a USB memory stick and had an idea for a future innovation.  Memory sticks that back themselves up. 

The reason for this post is to avoid someone else being able to patent an obvious idea.  I often have random thoughts that to me are obvious ideas but someone else eventually patents with one of those convoluted patents that is just a whole bunch of complicated sentences to hide the fact that what they are patenting is not a clever bit of new intellectual property but just the blatantly obvious that any technician could have come up with as a natural evolution.  It frustrates me that there are companies that try to enforce those patents and make people pay to do something that would be useful for everyone.

There are plenty of things that are very clever and the designers should be compensated for their efforts in getting it to work.  It is only the no effort wasters that I dislike.

Back to my idea.

It could work by each memory stick storing a little bit of power whenever it is plugged in or used.  There are plenty of existing technologies to do this, even a simple capacitor however I suspect it would need a much more efficient and tiny battery to be of practical use.

When a pair of these devices are plugged together or better still just come within the same vicinity they start to synchronise their data so that they both contain the same data.  This could be by directional or one way.  It would probably need a user setting to decide this.

This is ideal for ensuring you always have a backup of those family photos or business critical data.  Most people forget about backups until it is too late.

This copy is likely to take a long time, probably leaving them together overnight.  It would need an indicator to show when they were complete.  I would suggest a zero power consumption indicator such as the sort of technology used on the screens of e-books like the Amazon Kindle.

There would be things to consider such as how you deal with deleted files to avoid them being recreated from the other device but by the time you have enough processing power in the little devices to do the copy adding the extra detail would be trivial.

This could be used for all sorts of memory sticks and cards.  SD cards, USB memory sticks, SSDs and all the variations of them, pretty much all solid state devices.  The technology inside would be applicable to them all.

The connections could either be plug and socket or a special set of contacts or very very low power wireless of some sort.

It could even eventually be used for updating the firmware or settings in equipment from washing machines to computers to motor cars or just reading back the current settings.

JCB 24 September 2011