Wearables Reimagined

Wearables and I, we go a long way back. I still remember the first Pebble smartwatch I strapped onto my wrist sometime in mid-2013, and the company, fresh off the success of its $10 million crowdfunded Kickstarter campaign, looked set to be the one to beat in this soon-to-go-supernova segment. Back then, smartwatches were to be the next big thing, the platform that was going to free us from our smartphones, a place where the next big app would be built.

None of that happened. In fact, it was quite the opposite. The much-hyped market for wearables claimed victims faster than what we had seen following the introduction of the iPhone. In late 2016, Pebble filed for insolvency and sold itself to Fitbit for next to nothing, and then, in January, market leader Fitbit announced disappointing earnings as well. Even the recent launch of Android Wear 2.0, the biggest update to Google’s wearable operating system since its launch in 2014, and Wear 2.0 wearables by several premium brands like TAG Heuer, Mont Blanc and Hugo Boss has done little to excite the market. The sole exception has been the Apple Watch, which itself has pivoted to focus on its fitness tracking instead. It seems whenever I bring up the topic of wearables among my peers or in discussions with major tech brands, there’s an abundance of shoulder shrugs and rolled eyes, but little else.

Despite this general sense of doom and gloom, it is a bit too early to give up on wearables as a category. No, not the current incarnation of smartwatches, many of which include 3G/LTE connectivity – they are clearly crippled by today’s battery limitations and offer limited value to consumers. Instead, what could just work is a system of several focused and interconnected wearables. It could be possibly something you strap onto your wrist, combined with smart eyewear and connected earbuds, each with their own unique sensors/cameras, which communicate with the phone in your pocket to offer you real-time contextually relevant information. Some of the pieces of the puzzle exist today - if you are in the Apple ecosystem and pair an Apple Watch and AirPods to your phone, you can, for the most part, keep your phone in the pocket and rely largely on audio cues in your ear along with glanceable visual prompts to do a number of tasks.

The missing piece is a new iPhone with built-in augmented reality (AR) capabilities to provide that much -needed real world context and, who knows, maybe even a pair of normal, non-nerdy-looking AR glasses in the next couple of years. Instead of being front-and-centre devices that they are today, smartphones will be relegated to the background, serving as hidden pieces of hardware that power the entire seamless connected experience.

That is not to say a system like this wouldn’t have to tackle some challenges first. Privacy will continue to be a major concern, as the next generation of smart glasses would be able to record and shoot better quality video than Google Glass did a couple of years ago. Power management is critical too, and unless such a system integrates with your clothing or your backpacks and draws power from either (or is extremely low on power consumption), it is quite likely you are not going to be willing to carry 3-4 more independent devices and charge them every other day!

Invisible subdermal implants powered by your kinetic energy? Smart contact lenses that make the display disappear into your eyes? You never know!