Aaron Marcus of AMandA just gave a talk promoting the wrist-top computer as a prime ubiquitous computing platform. I’m skeptical — It feels to me like the wrist is good for quick access to info that’s already showing or just a button-press away, but if you have to drill down (pushing small buttons with your wrist in front of your face) then that quick-access gets washed out by the slow interaction speed. That leaves a pretty narrow set of applications where you just a little bit of information with very little cognitive load.
Reasons to work on wrist:
- quick access for quick snippit of visual info
- fashionable on wrist (bracelet)
- quick access for interaction (a little better than phone clip?)
- need wrist access (e.g. pulse monitor)
Reasons not to work on wrist:
- small screen
- very limited input possible
- anything you need to look at for a while (wrist gets tired of being held in that position).
- needs hardening (so it won’t break when you bang it on something)
So what applications have the wrist-top as the clear winner interface? Well, there’s telling the time, there’s textual alarms, there’s … um … gimme a second, there’s gotta be more ….
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