Sony has thrown open its SmartWatch to support alternative firmware, with the company hoping the Open SmartWatch Project will kickstart wearable development and maybe even give it a few new ideas itself. The new scheme – which, unsurprisingly, voids your SmartWatch warranty – allows coders to access the wearable’s hardware in new and unusual ways,
Bendable cameras and sensors that can flex around corners could be on the horizon, with the first flexible image sensor built on plastic being developed by Plastic Logic and ISORG. The 40 x 40 mm sensor uses a flexible, transmissive backplane created by Plastic Logic, on top of which ISORG layers an organic photodetector material
Of the contact lens display prototypes that we’ve seen so far, few if any are focused on comfort — a slight problem when they’re meant to sit on our eyeballs. A collaboration between Samsung and multiple universities may solve this with display tech that’s meant to be cozy from the start. By putting silver nanowires between graphene layers, researchers have created transparent conductors that can drive LEDs while remaining flexible enough to sit on a contact lens. Current test lenses only have one pixel, but they’re so soft that rabbits can wear them for five hours without strain. Scientists also see the seemingly inevitable, Glass-like wearable display as just one development path — they’re working on biosensors and active vision correction. While there’s still a long way to go before we reach a cyberpunk future of near-invisible displays, we may finally have some of the groundwork in place.
Filed under: Displays, Wearables, Science, Samsung
Source: ACS Publications
Google Glass has been facing a lot of criticism ever since the Explorer Edition was released earlier this year. Privacy concerns are the biggest issues surrounding the computerized pair of glasses, getting banned in numerous establishments already, with the most recent banning being Google’s own shareholders meeting. NOTE: Google has reached out to note that
Digital contact lenses that could eventually overlay Google Glass style data on top of the real world, while being as comfortable and discrete as traditional corrective lenses, have been developed by researchers at Samsung Display and elsewhere. The project – to develop a transparent, flexible display using graphene-metal nanowire hybrid structures to construct stretchable electrodes
Your every moment, documented. That’s the Memoto concept, a tiny wearable camera that snaps a shot every thirty seconds to digitally augment your memory. Early doubts as to whether enough people would want to record each waking moment were quickly squashed when the Memoto Kickstarter saw 11x the expected pledges, though the challenge of bringing
While the official Google Glass team is embroiled in a bit of controversy over which apps will and wont be allowed on the device’s official build this week, the folks behind ClockworkMod Recovery push forward with a new release for hacking the device. As it is on Android, so too does this software allow for
Wearables needn’t just be for humans: startup Whistle wants $100 to track man’s best friend, and the eponymous Whistle dog collar add-on is how it plans to do it. Collecting details of different types of activity, resting periods, and other information, Whistle pushes it not only to a companion app on your smartphone, but into
Google Glass has plenty of issues. There’s a fair chance you’ll get laughed at for wearing it, or at the very least stared at. Battery life won’t last you a day, and the list of things you can actually do with the wearable is limited. For all the Saturday Night Live skits and “Glasshole” jokes,
Although smartwatch makers have had access to e-paper for a while, there have been few such displays tailor-made for our wrists. E Ink is more than willing to fill that void with a new, watch-oriented version of its Mobius screen. The flexible, 1.73-inch panel won’t floor anyone with its 320 x 240 grayscale picture, but it can be cut into timepiece-friendly shapes that take more abuse than a typical e-reader. More importantly for us end users, E Ink already has at least one hardware partner lined up: Sonostar is using the tiny Mobius for a smartwatch this summer, and the odds are that the company won’t be alone.
Filed under: Peripherals, Wearables
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