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Comment by edm0nd | Hacker News Reader

They are cool but both Humane pin and the Rabbit R1 products were largely flops and failures. I do hope in the next 10-20 years this same tech will advance and actually work and be cool.

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The actual idea itself seems flawed rather than just the implementation. Ordering an uber on your phone and seeing where it is on the map is always going to be easier than trying to do it through voice and a hand projector.

And the rabbit was just an android app bundled with a low end phone.

I agree. It looked like a solution in search of a problem.

Which is very common when everyone has big hires screens and oodles of compute power in their pocket. What can a new entrant offer which couldn't be an app?

Workstations put a computer on your desk.

Laptops put a computer in your backpack.

Smartphones put a computer in your pocket.

(I’m not sure what is next, but it’s coming, eventually.)

Some people think it is the eyeball (glasses), some people think it is the brain (NeuraLink). Some people think it is the wristwatch. The pins were an attempt at a pendant. I don't think anyone has tried the necklace, yet. A glove might also be interesting. If the peripheral keeps shrinking, it could be a ring, or set of rings, or an earring. Or a fairy that follows you around like in Ocarina of Time. We could write a theorem about convenience of use and capabilities at different scales for peripherals. It is worth noting that some sizes never really go obsolete, but rather enhance in power and capability.

Interaction on smaller devices is harder, so they focus more on consumption. The smart glasses will probably be annoying to interact with so you’ll just get a TikTok feed of endless content and maybe a single input to skip the current content and train the feed.

> I’m not sure what is next, but it’s coming, eventually.

Getting computers smaller and smaller gets impractical in terms of user interface. A possibility is neural implants. But the other direction we’re already facing is just smarter everything with microprocessors everywhere. Each device does not need to run Android to be useful (or annoying, because not everything needs to get smart and adding processing is also adding new and exciting failure modes). But each device still integrates a computer.

The answer is so clearly the glasses and always has been. Private audio output, visual information on a HUD.

I guess I just don’t see the appeal over a smartphone. How often are your hands incapacitated where it warrants all the other advantages of that form factor? And the R1 form factor largely didn’t even have that advantage.

> How often are your hands incapacitated where it warrants all the other advantages of that form factor?

Even then, that use case is covered by Bluetooth headphones connected to a phone that can be either in a pocket or stowed safely 10m away.

Smartphones exploded when devs were given a bunch of cool new I/O followed by rapid cost reduction. Shame that the startups doing the cool hardware don’t do that… can’t say it’s the funding. They sure had enough.

Smartphones exploded because they introduced a new, better form of input to the general market. Most use cases do NOT require fine precision of input, so buttons were unnecessary, and the market had already tried both few and many buttons. Smart on-screen keyboards and an UI entirely controllable with touch was a revolution people don't want to come back from until they DO need that precision, which is why gaming accessories like the bone exist, but are a niche.

A projector is none of that. A projector is a gimmick. The projector could cost $5 and it would still fail to capture an audience if it wasn't just a side-feature on a more conventional phone.

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