The devices we (will) wear

The form factors best suited for the tasks we will do 5–10 years from now

(Picture credit: everything-pr.com)

Mobile is eating the world. The current default computing interface for a lot of people, even in markets like India and China, is the mobile phone. Before mobiles, it was the laptop and before laptops it was the PC / desktop. As we fit more and more computing power into smaller devices, you might expect this trend to continue. However, the end game here is not necessarily smaller and smaller computers that we carry in our pockets. The end game is that we will settle on the device and the interface that has the best form factor given the task at hand. In the next 5–10 years, this means we will have various computing devices (phones, glasses, watches, clothes etc.) that we wear on different parts of our body, and these devices will interact with each other to do our tasks for us.

Here are some computing devices that we will all be carrying on us in a few years (if not today):

1. Glasses: By glasses, I mean any device worn over your eyes. It can be a simple head-up display like Google Glass, but can also extend to fully-equipped virtual reality (VR) or augmented reality (AR) devices that you wear over your eyes. The proximity to our eyes makes glasses the most natural device for tasks that require our sense of sight.
2. Watches: This means any device worn on your wrists. It might have a touch screen (e.g. Apple watch) or might not (e.g. Fitbit), but is most likely to have a display of some sort. Wrists are a unique location because the devices worn on them can not only capture motion and pulse, but also are easy to look at when they have a display. Also traditionally, we wore wrist watches, so wrists are a natural place for most people to wear a device.
3. Phones: Phones can be distilled down as small touch-screens that you can carry in your pocket. Phones give you a relatively large screen compared to other wearables. The large screen is easy for both looking at stuff and interacting with it using your fingers. Also, in the near-term, phones will continue to be the device you carry that has the most computing power crammed into it.
4. Earpieces: This means any device that goes into your ear. The proximity to your ears make earpieces best suited for tasks that have sound as an output.
5. Clothes: Smart clothes will have embedded sensors and computing capability in the future. The big disadvantage with clothes is that we wear different ones everyday. So for clothes to be reliable computing interfaces, all of our clothes need to be “smart”. In the near term you can expect smart clothes to be used only for specialized use-cases such as sports and fitness tracking before they become more mainstream.
6. Other wearables: Shoes, headbands, medical devices etc. These have similar pros and cons as smart clothes.

Outside of the wearable devices world, advances in software are happening fast too. Here are a few other things happening in parallel.

Speech recognition is getting really good. Deep learning, specifically RNNs, have lead to a step increase in the accuracy of speech recognition, and it will only get better from here. It’s amazing how well devices like the Amazon Echo work, purely based on their ability to recognize the spoken word. It’s safe to assume that, in the future, any of the devices above will have the capability to recognize speech and take actions based on voice commands.

Motion detection will also get better over time. Microsoft Kinect has proven we can do a good job with detecting gestures, poses and other body motion, and over time it will get even better. In the next few years you should expect better motion detection done by the devices you are already wearing such as smart watches and clothes.

Given these impending changes in devices and technologies, it’s not very hard to take the everyday tasks that we do using mobile phones today and project what device / interface these tasks will converge to a few years from now. Below, I’ll list each of these tasks, break them down into the constituent sub-tasks involved in performing the task, and project how we will do them in the future.

Phone calls

• Sub-tasks involved: Going through your contacts and finding the person you want to talk to. Then actually talking to them.
• Interfaces you will use in the future: You will use your voice for finding the person and doing the actual talking. An earpiece will be best suited for listening. A few people already do their phone calls this way now.

SMS / Simple messaging

• Sub-tasks: Going through your contacts and finding the person you want to send a message to. Then typing and reading messages.
• Interfaces: Voice for connecting to people and sending messages. Glasses or watches for reading.

Reading long-form text

• Sub-tasks: Reading
• Interfaces: Glasses or phones when you are outside your home. Bigger screens, like tablets, when you are home.

Writing long-form text

• Sub-tasks: Writing. Editing. Optionally some reading and doing research.
• Interfaces: Voice is the best interface for the actual writing part. However it will be hard to figure out how to do the other sub-tasks like editing and research using voice alone. Maybe, in the future, this is still done using physical keyboards and bigger screens, similar to how it’s done today.

Activity monitoring / health tracking

• Sub-tasks: The actual monitoring like steps or calories or pulse etc. Analyzing data. Reading the output.
• Interfaces: Smart clothes, watches, shoes etc. in conjunction with smarter motion detection should be able to do monitoring better than anything else. Analysis can be done on the devices or the cloud and reading can best be done via glasses or watches.

Maps / Directions

• Sub-tasks: Finding places. Getting step-by-step directions as you move.
• Interfaces: Voice for finding places. Glasses or earpiece for the actual step-by-step navigation.

Playing games

• Sub-tasks: Games can be considered a simulation of the real world and thus involve us using all our senses just like we use them in the real world.
• Interfaces: Glasses, for example VR-style playing units, for visual output. Earpieces for auditory output. Smart clothes for tactile output. Motion and voice as inputs.

Searching / Finding information

• Sub-tasks: The actual search. Then browsing results, and optionally going deeper into a few of them.
• Interfaces: Voice as input. Earpiece / glasses as output if there are a small number of results. If there is a long list of results that you have to navigate and research into (e.g. when searching for restaurants for lunch), phone screens might be better.

Taking pictures

• Sub-tasks: Using a camera to take pictures.
• Interfaces: Glasses

Looking at photos / watching videos

• Sub-tasks: Searching and navigating through the photo and video lists. Then actually looking at the photos / watching the videos.
• Interfaces: Voice for search. Phones for navigation, especially when you are navigating through a large number of options. For photos and short videos, glasses for display. For mid-length videos, phones for display. For long videos and movies, a large screen such as a tablet or a TV for display.

Listening to music

• Sub-tasks: Searching and navigating through content. Then actually listening to the music.
• Interfaces: Voice for search. Phones for navigation, especially when you are navigating through a large number of options. Earpieces for listening.

The above list captures the possible changes we can expect in the next 5–10 years. Given the pace of technological change, it’s very hard to predict the future beyond that, so I’m not going to refrain from doing that. Let’s see how many of these actually come true.