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114 • Thin Air: How Wireless Technology Supports Lean Initiatives
size of a sugar cube. Both futurists and technology providers predict wearable
computers, which will evolve to include voice recognition and recognition
of eye movement and gestures. Some call this the personal memory
assistant, an always-on, always-connected mobile tool. We likely will not
dig it from our pockets and handbags; we will wear it as glasses, or in its
smallest form, an earpiece or badge (like Kirk and Spock wore). 66
The PMA will do more than assist us: it will do things we cannot. With
superior always-at-hand processing power, it will extend users’ ability
to categorize, collate, prepare, and search documents. We will talk to it
as a thinking machine, asking, for example, “Find all documents after
January 1 this year with the word strings, ‘Tort costs’ and ‘appeal.’ ” Or
the computer itself will categorize and collate documents, based on our
historic usage.
Jeff Jacobsen of Kopin, Inc. meets us at the Industry Wizards office outside
of San Francisco. He hands over a small black box, about the size of
two ring-boxes stuck end on end. It looks like the single-slide viewers that
photographers used to use, but instead of a vacation picture, you see a
Windows interface.
“Mail,” said Jacobsen, and “Number Three.” An e-mail screen opens,
and the third item on the list opens. The device has no keyboard, but he
can record and send a voice reply, or, allow the voice recognition capability
to turn the recording into text and reply with an e-mail. We observe
that the SkyMall catalogue offers several liquid-crystal display glassesshaped
interfaces for watching films, which simulate the wide-screen TV
experience.
“We made those,” said Jacobsen of the display. Kopin introduced its
CyberDisplay product line in 1997, and has shipped more than 30 million
units to customers including JVC, Kodak, Olympus, and Samsung. Kopin
displays are used in camcorders, digital cameras, and the mobile video
eyewear for watching TV, music videos, and movies; browsing the Web;
and checking e-mail from mobile devices such as cell phones. If none of
that seems a serious enough application, CyberDisplay LCDs are in the
advanced night-vision goggles and thermal weapon sights used by the U.S.
Army.
What Jacobsen is holding is only a prototype, and was released six
months later as Golden-i, a sleek, three-ounce, head-mounted display
(HMD). “This device brings a person as close [to] the Borg collective as you
can get without an operation,” said Jacobsen, referring to the villainous
© 2010 by Taylor and Francis Group, LLC