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This smartwatch can project a tiny dancing man onto your hand
The nice thing about smartwatches is that they put information right on your wrist so it's easy to check. But what if that information was even more visible? What if that information was right on the back of your hand?
That question, I can only assume, is what led to the creation of Haier's Asu watch, an enormous smartwatch with a built-in projector. The projector allows the watch to display information on the back of your hand, essentially serving as a second screen.
Haier uses the projection to provide additional information. So when you're running, the projection will display distance, time, and progress toward fitness goals, while the watch screen will have controls to pause and finish your workout. The projection actually supports gesture controls, too: you can double tap on your hand to change what's on the screen. It didn't work very well when I tried it, but Haier says the whole watch is still in development.
(Score: 2) by The Archon V2.0 on Friday March 02 2018, @09:12PM (8 children)
This projector/smartwatch looks more viable than the Cicret, but I'm still not seeing the point.
Of course, I don't see the point of smartwatches in general....
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday March 02 2018, @09:22PM
If you stole the Samgoog smarwatch of 2050 from the future, I bet it would be really useful.
But the people from 2050 would still think it was a useless gimmick.
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(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Friday March 02 2018, @11:18PM (6 children)
It's convenience of information: a smartwatch serves as a time and motion saver. Mostly phone is in pocket, stays in pocket, watch talks to phone so I don't have to.
All day:
Email? Smartwatch buzzes, roll wrist over, ah, it's that shill wanting donations for [FITB] party again, swipe it off, it's seleted. Or tap it to read it if it's of interest, or, drag out phone, or, open/switch to email client at your desk. Slack post? Ignore, it's just the intern asking another question about WhatCollegeForgotToTeach, let LowPukeOnTotemPole deal. Text? Kid wants their allowance early. Hold on face, say "NO!", let go. Oh, hey, look, a chess move! Pull out phone, deal, put away, on with life. Time? Roll wrist, observe CoolFaceOfTheDay.
End of day:
X steps, Y stairs, Z calories.
Beginning of day:
Sleep stats.
Available info:
Depending on the face: immediate availability of time, day, date, battery states (phone and watch), multiple time zones, image thumbnails, tiny little videos, sunup/sundown, weather, exercise state from heart rate to blood oxy (depending on watch), moon phase, GPS location / altitude / map, phone audio controls, the usual run of stopwatches, timers, counters, reminders, agenda, compass, "find my phone", tiny flashlight, and basically every notification your phone chokes up that you allow through (you can set some to not show, thank goodness.)
Different faces put different items "up front", or not, so you can manage the watch by the task at hand, so to speak. Want to change the face? Tap and hold, pick from thumbnails, bang, there you have it.
That's all without adding any apps. Apps add pretty much whatever, you have to look at them to see what's available for a particular watch. Also, I'm speaking of my Samsung smartwatch. Apple probably offers different things. I pretty much despise Apple as a company these last few years, due to their idiocy WRT my Macs and their OS(s), so I haven't even bothered to look at what they offer in smartwatches. Mea culpa = dunno.
Some of the watch faces are undeniably very cool / pretty / info-jammed, etc. So there's lots of eye candy. I have one that's basically nothing more than a mass of moving gears. It's truly drool-worthy to the eye, and provides nothing but the time (and that's not even that easy to read with all that gold-n-silver motion going on. But... yeah, very pretty.)
There's no question that these things, all of them, vary in value to individuals. But when the value of enough of them is high enough, that's when the watch has a point.
The downsides: At the moment, near as I can tell, that's exactly two things:
Finally, this kind of "is it for me" weighting goes on for almost everyone. No phone / simple flip phone / smartphone; bike / little car / big pickup; little shortwave portable / mega-SDR; etc., etc., etc.
TL;DR: Very happy with my smartwatch. And that's the point.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday March 03 2018, @12:47AM (1 child)
Suggestions to manufacturer:
1. Ditch the projector and add a second slide-under LCD if additional display space is needed. Definitely doable with today's tech, even if prone to failure with heavy use. Or,
2. Replace the projector with a flashlight, bonus points for a highly coherent one.
Suggestion to fyngyrz:
Lay off the gadgets, Clock King. Your backstory is like this Batman villain --
Also make us some of those cool spectacles with clock faces [wikipedia.org] on them. You could be one rich nigger if you could project live ticking clock faces onto spectacles.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Saturday March 03 2018, @01:08AM
I could riposte by telling you how to live your life. But that would make me seem like a dimwit, so I'll pass. :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 03 2018, @03:21AM (3 children)
I couldn't function with that many interruptions.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by takyon on Saturday March 03 2018, @07:26AM (2 children)
Don't worry, there's a drug for that.
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(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday March 03 2018, @07:29AM (1 child)
Come to think of it, we could make a smartwatch that administered microdoses of drugs based on a schedule or anything it can detect like heart rate, step count, etc.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 03 2018, @02:02PM
Out you could just hand out free morphine patches. For first aid or something. Big pharma thanks you!