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Comment by SurrealSoul | Hacker News Reader

I feel like we are pushing this wearable tech thing too hard. Pushing all the cool ways we can put stuff into things (ordering pizza from your shoes, snapchatting from your glasses) but they ALWAYS boil down to "You can touch XYZ instead of your phone to pause your music".

When we will get some decent applications, instead of enhancing the form

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Have you seen how many silly versions of bicycles and airplanes we got in the early 1900s? Suicide doors on cars and funny little wings on the back?

Things take a while to converge.

Suicide doors are back, with auto locking

BMW i3? What other vehicles?

It's no longer in production, but the Mazda RX-8 has them and it's still pretty common on the road.

Vauxhall Meriva, also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cars_with_non-standard...

One way to look at wearable tech is as an extension of the surface of your smartphone. If you can interact with your phone throughout your clothing, there could be a lot of room for (warning, buzzword!) innovation there.

Extension of the touch sensing aspect of the phone screen, not the display aspect. Extending one without the other leads to over-engineered pause buttons, is what the parent comment was saying I think. When the number of unlabeled buttons get much higher than 1, people start to get confused.

I agree in part, just think that the jacket needs to be paired with a HUD or maybe have control/button labels that can shine through the fabric in order to open up that innovation.

I'm not sure we need screens on our jackets, we just need two-way communication. Right now, Jacquard only allows one-way communication (human -> device), but perhaps there could be a touch-sensitive way for the device to communicate as well.

This would be huge for things like heart monitors and emergency phone calls. A lot of room for "cool social apps for teens", and almost definitely for gaming/VR.

Good point. The two paths on a phone are touch/mic/gyro input and screen/speakers/vibe output, but we don't need all three of those outputs for clothing-based touch input to work.

> Right now, Jacquard only allows one-way communication (human -> device)

Wasn't there mention of light and haptic feedback?

Yes, this. If we didn't have phones as much as pervasive connectivity, through whatever network link is nearby (a phone, a watch, or a building with wifi), then the idea of how we interface with software changes. We could do it though voice like Alexa, or through smaller interface devices including those woven in.

I think the basic problem there is that we have run out of things do to via mobile in general, at least outside of the corporate world.

Frankly most of what people do on "smartphones" today that is not work related could be done on featurephones a decade or more ago.

This is kind of sad. Computers in general should let us do more stuff outside corporate world. That's pretty much the definition of empowering humans. But I guess it doesn't monetize well enough.

or there is simply only so many tasks that can be done without a human physically present, thus nullifying any point of doing it remotely.

“most of what people do...”

This is almost surely wrong but you made the intentionally vague comment so it’s not so easy to point out where you’re wrong. You might claim, for example, that tasks like email or internet browsing existed but they did not work as well.

Also, we certainly haven’t run out of things to do with mobile. We’re talking watches, phones, and tablets, etc right?

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