Top 10 Most Important Wearable Trends in 2017

Written by Brooks Canavesi on . Posted in Blog, Mobile App Development, Technology trends

2016 was a good year for wearables.  According to data from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Wearable Device Tracker, total shipment volumes reached 19.7 million units in 1Q16, an increase of 67.2% from the 11.8 million units shipped in 1Q15. Ramon Llamas, research manager for IDC’s Wearables team, said that “the wearables market continues to mature and expand.”

Wearable devices still have a long way to go, but the technology has found its way into the hearts of consumers from around the world, who now eagerly await a new generation of products; one that will be sleeker, tighter, and more affordable than the current generation. These two meta-trends—maturation and expansion—will continue to play an important role even in 2017, as we’ll see when we go through our list of top 10 most important wearable trends in 2017.

10. Moving Beyond Smartwatches

For a long time, wearable devices were synonymous with smartwatches. Perhaps it was the influence of decades’ worth of sci-fi movies that caused the wrist to feel like the most sensible place where to put a small, sensor-equipped computer. Maybe it was our deep-rooted love for wristwatches combined with a desire to improve upon the timeless concept.

What matters now is that engineers and designers of wearables realize that our bodies offer plenty more convenient places for wearable devices, such as our fingers and feet. Nimb is a ring with an integrated panic button that can send an alert to friends and family, community members, people nearby, or emergency services. It looks like a beautiful fashion accessory, rather than a state-of-the-art piece of wearable technology, and works in a very discreet manner.

The word discreet has played an equally important role in the design of Ringly, a line of bracelets and rings that connect to smartphones via Bluetooth, effortlessly keeping track of steps, distance, and calories burned—metrics that previously required a person to wear a bulky smartwatch.

Under Armour has shown other footwear manufacturers how to design a good smart shoe capable of tracking time, cadence, duration, distance, splits, and other things in the natural way possible. Others, such as Xiaomi, followed Under Armour’s lead soon after, and we expect to see this trend continue even in 2017.

9. New Metrics

Walking a few hundred extra steps every day is a good way how to lose a few pounds of fat, but it takes much more than that to achieve happiness and balance in life. The upcoming generation of wearable devices is aware of this, and it leverages some of the scientifically proven effects of mindfulness practice on the brain to affect the structure and neural patterns in the brain.

One such device is called Feel. This smart bracelet recognized and tracks your emotions throughout the day and provides you with personalized coaching to help you achieve your emotional well-being goals. It does this by measuring responses from a variety of physiological signals sent by a person’s Autonomic Nervous System (ANS). Vinaya has similar goals, only with a greater emphasis on fashion and style, instead of science and data.

8. Project Soli

According to Google, “Project Soli is developing a new interaction sensor using radar technology. The sensor can track sub-millimeter motions at high speed and accuracy. It fits onto a chip, can be produced at scale and built into small devices and everyday objects.”

Compared to cameras, radar technology has several key advantages. It has a very high positional accuracy, allowing developers to sense the tiniest motions with utmost precision. It can also work through materials, and, above all, the whole technology fits on a single chip with no moving parts, which could break. “It’s a tiny sliver you could balance on your pinky toenail, with four antennas that provide full duplex communication for sending and receiving radar pings,” commented Hakim Raja, Soli’s lead hardware and production engineer.

With Soli, developers can borrow a language based on the metaphors we are already familiar with from physical controls and use it as a way how to interact with virtual objects and user interfaces.

7. The Ability to Power Wearables Through Motion or Body Heat

The limitations imposed by our current battery technology are at the very top of what customers complain about when it comes to modern electronic devices. Most smartphones are happy to work for two consecutive days on a single charge, and smartwatches are nothing to write home about either.

Fortunately, new ways how to generate electricity are just around the corner. “Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a new design for harvesting body heat and converting it into electricity for use in wearable electronics,” states the university in a blog post. “Wearable thermoelectric generators (TEGs) generate electricity by making use of the temperature differential between your body and the ambient air,” the university further explains.

Chinese researchers have taken the concept of TEGs and turned it into a flexible, wearable thermocell capable of producing about 0.3 µW of power at 0.7V, which is enough power for a simple e-ink display, for example. Others, such as a lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), create devices that can harvests mechanical energy from bending movements and convert it into electrical energy. As demonstrated during a fashion show in Bangkok, these technologies can be used together to develop smart fabrics that can harvest electricity from both the sunshine and the human body. Undoubtedly, they will play a central role in the design of many upcoming wearable devices.

6. Untethered Virtual Reality Experiences

Despite a substantial amount of skepticism, virtual reality headsets have become the coolest tech gift for Christmas 2016, proving to everyone that it’s here to stay and improve. One particular way how all VR experiences can instantly become more immersive is the attainment of what Jim Merrick, Qualcomm’s IoT director, calls “six degrees of freedom.” “We need to get to the couch, where people can consume content, where they already consume content, in the living room,” he argues against VR headsets that tether users to PCs. The ultimate goal is to allow users to move in a 3D space naturally. “If you step forward in the real world, you do [the same] in the virtual one.” Qualcomm’s solution is a reference headset called Qualcomm Snapdragon VR820, which relies on the incredible processing power of their Snapdragon 820 processor and a clarity of a pair of 1440 x 1440 resolution AMOLED panels that support up to 70Hz 4K video playback and a low latency of 18ms. Intel has also revealed their untethered VR and AR platform, Project Alloy. Alloy uses dual RealSense cameras to monitor location and position of objects around the user, promoting the concept of mixed reality. Other big names in the VR game are expected to demonstrate their upcoming untethered VR systems in the near future.

5. A Spiritual Successor to Pebble

One of the hottest tech news stories of the Q4 of 2016 was the acquisition of Pebble by Fitbit, an American manufacturer of fitness products designed to help users stay motivated and improve their health by tracking activity, exercise, food, weight, and sleep. Pebble’s talent and their homegrown smartwatch platform could help Fitbit better compete with Android Wear devices and high-end smartwatches from Apple. Unlike the products carrying the logo of either Google or Apple, both Pebble and Fitbit share data freely with other third-party apps and take a utilitarian approach to aesthetics. The upcoming successor to Pebble smartwatches is likely going to focus on health and fitness tracking while staying faithful to the original design philosophy, which helped Pebble rack up over $10 million in Kickstarter backings, becoming one of the biggest projects to date.

4. The Comeback of Smartglasses

In the world where the hype surrounding the initial release of Google Glass have fizzled out and morphed into skepticism about the entire concept, Snap Inc. have released an instant cult classic and single-handedly resurrected smartglasses from the ashes. Spectacles, a pair of funky video-recording sunglasses that take pictures and record video from the perspective of their wearer, removed everything that was nerdy and unappealing about Google Glass and replaced it with sheer, even if flawed, fun. After seeing the incredible success of Snap Inc’s Spectacles, other tech and sunglasses manufacturers, such as RaptorAR and Vuzix, have decided to join the party with sharply focused products. Apple is rumored to be working on a pair of smartglasses as well, so we have a lot we can look forward to in 2017.

3. Project Jacquard

“Project Jacquard makes it possible to weave touch and gesture interactivity into any textile using standard, industrial looms. Everyday objects such as clothes and furniture can be transformed into interactive surfaces,” states the team behind this amazing technology on the official website. In collaboration with their industrial partners, the creators of Project Jacquard have developed new conductive yarns that combine thin, metallic alloys with natural and synthetic yarns like cotton, polyester, or silk. These yarns are supposed to be indistinguishable from the traditional yarns that are used to produce fabrics today. When woven throughout the textile or at precise locations, Jacquard would provide manufacturers of wearable devices with a very discreet way how to capture touch and gesture data and wirelessly transmit them to mobile phones or other devices. One of the first articles of clothing that uses the technology is The Levi’s Commuter Trucker Jacket. “Jacquard allows wearers to control their mobile experience and connect to a variety of services, such as music or maps, directly from the jacket. This is especially useful when it might be difficult to use the smartphone, like when you are riding on your bike.”

2. Daydream VR

Mobile VR is seen by many as the perfect way how to experience the wonders of virtual reality, but the current technology is severely limited. On the one hand, there is Samsung Gear VR, which works only with a small number of flagship smartphones from the South Korean manufacturer. On the other hand, there is a large sea of Cardboard-compatible headsets that work with just about any Android smartphone but are limited in terms of graphical fidelity and the sense of presence they provide. Google wants to bridge this gap with Daydream, a virtual reality platform developed by Google for Android Nougat consisting of Daydream-compatible headsets, Daydream-ready smartphones, a wireless controller, and a special VR software mode that lets users use virtual reality apps, such as YouTube, Google Maps Street View, Google Play Movies & TV, and Google Photos in an immersive view. The first phone by Google, Pixel, is also the first Daydream-ready smartphone. Just like all upcoming Daydream-ready smartphones, Pixel has a crisp, low-persistence screen, ample processing power, and runs on the latest version of Google’s mobile operating system. Many manufacturers, including Samsung, LG, HTC, Asus, Xiaomi, ZTE, and Huawei, have already stated they will be making Daydream-ready phones, headsets,t and controllers. In 2017, a compatibility with Google Daydream could be a major deciding factor when buying a new smartphone; even mid-range devices are now powerful enough to satisfy most users, so extra features such as smooth, high-fidelity virtual reality, will likely play a vital role.

1.   The Rise of Hearables

We have yet to witness the first big hearable release, but the steady rise of this niche type of werable devices represents the noticeable shift toward persistent ambient computing. The same shift is represented by AI-enabled assistants like Siri, Alexa, Cortana, or the Google Assistant. Persistent ambient computing is possible, to a great extent, thanks to the recent advancements in artificial intelligence and speech recognition. The main idea behind hearables is to shrink the technology inside Amazon Echo or Google Home and fit it inside a small in-ear headphone. Some of the first hearables on the market will focus on music control and phone calls, but others have higher aspirations. For example, The Pilot is an earpiece which translates between languages “using the latest technologies in speech recognition, machine translation, and the advances of wearable technology,” as explained on the project’s Indiegogo page. The possibilities of what could be achieved in another few years with this technology are mind-bending. The rise of hearables could lead to the same fundamental shift in communication, our access to information, and our ability to cross borders and cultures as the internet did.

Top 3 Pitfalls of Mobile Application Development

Written by Brooks Canavesi on . Posted in Blog, Mobile App Development

A lucid mobile strategy plays a vital role in marketing efforts and businesses’ overall chances of success. With more than 50 percent of global internet users accessing the internet via mobile, a humble app serves as a gateway to the global market, inviting hundreds of millions of potential customers to visit your business or try out your service or product.

However, mobile development is a complex process with many pitfalls that pose a grave danger for those who come unprepared. The average app can cost $40,000 – $100,000+ and takes almost 18 weeks to publish. Those two figures alone should be enough to convince you that it pays off to properly plan your mobile application development and familiarize yourself with all top 3 pitfalls of mobile application development described in this article.

1. Over-Promising

Thousands of new mobile apps are being released every single day, with only a handful of them ever gaining any significant traction. Backed by venture capital, overzealous developers often promise features they, at the end of the day, can’t or are unable to implement.

Users have gotten used to this and developed a keen intuition for spotting empty promises, and companies who indulge in them get mercilessly bashed on social media sites like Reddit and Twitter. The last thing you want is a negative marketing even before you have a chance to launch your app.

The solution is, as always, simple: focus your marketing efforts on the key features of your app and, if you can, over-deliver on launch. It’s always better to let users discover what extra things the app can do rather than risking bad reviews. You can always introduce additional features with subsequent updates, which also serves as a nice segue into the next point on the list. The term MVP – Minimal Viable Product is tossed around the development industry frequently, however challenge yourself to consider a CVP – Commercially Viable Product.  A CVP is required to compete in a fast-paced industry where STM (Speed To Market) can make or break an idea or company.

2. Letting Your Apps Sit Stale

Many see the release date as a finish line after a long and often strenuous run. In reality, the initial development phase is more akin to a months-long preparation before stepping on the stage of the Mr. Olympia competition. A few slip ups and your entire effort could go to waste. And if you want to enter the stage again the next year, you better do what you can to become even stronger.

Both the Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store have many long-term apps that have remained popular to this very day. The continuous effort of their developers has been helping them keep pace with OS updates, releases of new design guidelines, and requests from the users.

On the other hand, both app stores are filled with apps that were once incredibly popular but fell into obscurity due to lack of updates. App companies need to budget for continuous improvements and updates as Apple and Google can update their respective OS’s without much warning.  Failing to comply could render your app useless.  In order to stay relevant, expect to spend money on ongoing app maintenance and new features. More often than not, simply listening to what your users say about the app is enough to give you a good general sense of direction as to where your app should be heading.

3. Spreading Yourself Too Thin

If you look at Wikipedia’s list of mobile phone features, you’ll quickly realize just how much has mobile phone development evolved over the past 10 years. And if you consider where the industry is heading, it will become clear that the average mobile app of today will likely have little in common with the average mobile app released another 10 years in the future.

The growing complexity of mobile app development boils down to one thing: it’s impossible to have it all. During a conference meeting, it’s easy to throw in features such as push notifications, cloud synchronization, multi-OS support, and many others, but it’s usually much harder to implement all of them in a timely manner and without exceeding the budget.

Instead of asking yourself “How can I build an app that takes advantage of all these cool things?” as Julian Mellicovsky puts it in his blog post, try to get in the mind of your users and focus on solving their most painful problems while prioritizing most-wanted features. This will prevent your app from becoming bloated and overly complex.

Use a similar approach to streamline the user interface and user experience. Focus testing is a great way how you can keep your own design sensibilities from intervening with what your users want and like to use.

Why Translators Fear Google

Written by Brooks Canavesi on . Posted in Blog, Mobile App Development, Technology trends

When you type the phrase “translators jobs AI” into Google, the very first result leads to a Quora question titled “When will translators and interpreters lose their jobs to AI?” Paul Denlinger answered it by saying, “They will lose their jobs when computers understand context and nuance.” Well, with Google’s latest big update for Google Translator, that may happen sooner rather than later.

On September 27, 2016, Google has rolled out the Google Neural Machine Translation system (GNMT), “which utilizes state-of-the-art training techniques to achieve the largest improvements to date for machine translation quality,” explain Quoc V. Le and Mike Schuster in their blog post. Until the release of this update, Google had been relying on another model, which involves breaking sentences into individual phrases and breaking those phrases even further into words. The old model was known for producing convoluted and hard-to-understand translations, especially in the case of notoriously difficult language pairs such as Chinese and English.

But, after testing the new version of Google Translate, several tech commentators have reported that the system is now approaching human-level accuracy. Try translating a complex sentence—even one with historicisms and obscure names of places and events—and you will likely be just as surprised by the accuracy of the translation as Nick Statt from The Verge and others were.

That being said, the system is by no means perfect. “GNMT can still make significant errors that a human translator would never make, like dropping words and mistranslating proper names or rare terms,” Google admits. However, by using a system modeled after neural connections in the human brain, these gaps could quickly disappear. The system is even said to have developed “its own internal language to represent the concepts it uses to translate between other languages.”

Surprisingly, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics  predicts a 46 percent increase in translation job opportunities between 2012 and 2022. Tony Guerra, the director of interpretation services at CETRA, even said, “Google Translate has a role: it can provide a very rough and overall sense. But it does not understand or distinguish certain phrases.” That’s exactly where both he and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics may be wrong.

There’s no doubt that high-stakes translators won’t be replaced by computers anytime soon—perhaps even never—but what about millions of translators and interpreters who work on a freelance basis, dealing with an endless stream of mundane translations of descriptions for cheap products, internal company guidelines and policies, and high-school homework? ZDNet lists the profession of a translator as the 9th job that will be automated by AI and robots. Considering the article was posted more than a year ago, it would be interesting to see where would the author place translators now.

The key here is convenience. It takes time, money, and effort to hire a translator, but it takes just a few seconds to copy-paste the text into Google Translate. And when the software spits out something that looks legitimate, it’s easy to imagine many cases where someone would just decide to use what Google Translate thinks is the right translation. That right there represents an hour or two of work for some freelancer, which doesn’t seem significant until you realize that the Google Translate mobile and web apps account for around 18 million translations per day for Chinese to English alone.

Once Google perfects the technology behind their text-based translation system, they could use it in other, even more interesting ways. “A few wearable tech upstarts are showing interest in the area of translation hearables,” says Sophie Charara in her article for Wareable. One company, Doppler Labs, is developing a real-time hearable device that would allow for in-ear translation of Spanish. A start-up named Waverly Labs have raised $3.5 million on Indiegogo to fund a smart earpiece language translator which translates between users speaking different languages. The device won’t be out until May 2017, but it already serves as a clear evidence confirming the large demand for the technology.

It could be that the profession of a translator will change and adopt these technologies as essential tools for working in a more efficient manner. Machines could do the first draft and real human beings could then use their expertise and knowledge to polish the final product to perfection. But where accuracy and appropriateness of style don’t play a huge role, there will likely be no work left for real translators.

Intel Project Alloy: Is There a New Sheriff in Town?

Written by Brooks Canavesi on . Posted in Blog, Mobile App Development, Technology trends

Intel CEO Brian Krzanich unveiled Project Alloy, a new virtual reality platform, during his opening keynote at the 2016 Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. “The Alloy platform completely redefines what is possible in an all-in-one VR platform,” states Intel in their press release, referring to Alloy’s mixed use of augmented and virtual reality.

To those who closely follow the virtual reality industry, Intel’s entry into the crowded mosh pit that is VR likely comes as no surprise. The company has missed their chance when it comes to mobile, so the pressure is on them to come up with a technology that would help them stay as relevant in the future mobile-first world filled with virtual and augmented reality experiences as they are now.

Google has been pushing virtual reality with their ultra-affordable headset made from cardboard, and, with Google Daydream, the company is now starting to establish itself in the as a worthy competitor to Samsung’s Gear VR, a mid-range mobile virtual reality headset. But neither of these companies occupies the spot that Intel wants to seize. The main target is the same demographic that would purchase an Oculus Rift headset for its superior graphical fidelity and immersion.

“Merged reality delivers virtual world experiences more dynamically and naturally than ever before and makes experiences impossible in the real world now possible,” said Intel’s chief executive, Brian Krzanich. Project Alloy revolves around Intel’s RealSense technologies, a platform for implementing gesture-based human-computer interaction techniques.

When used for the purposes of virtual reality, RealSense technologies help Intel get rid of several critical restrictions of current VR solutions. For starters, Project Alloy cuts all cords, allowing users to enjoy a free range of motion without being chained to a computer. To ensure users won’t bump into real objects while being immersed in virtual worlds, Alloy employs advanced collision detection and avoidance system. As a user approaches, let’s say, a wall, the wall will become visible in the virtual world.

Not only that but the same technology also allows you to bring your own hands into your virtual world and use them to interact with objects just like you would in real life. The RealSense cameras on the headset can accurately track finger movements, analyze them in real time, and project them back into the virtual environment with an unnoticeable delay of just a few milliseconds. What’s possible with a technology like this is limited only by the imagination of developers.

Intel knows that and is ready to support developers by releasing a suite of sensing and computing technologies and collaborating with Microsoft to ensure that Windows-based content works great on Alloy and other Intel-based virtual reality devices. According to Intel’s website, “Intel will open the Alloy hardware and provide open APIs for the ecosystem, allowing developers and partners to create their own branded products from the Alloy design, in 2017.”

The current version of Project Alloy, which is still just an early prototype, shares certain design features of both PlayStation VR and Samsung’s Gear VR. One commentator complained about problems with fit and comfort, saying that the headset felt too heavy. But, according to Tim Parker from Intel, the final version of Project Alloy will offer a much better user experience. The company plans to ship first units in the second half of 2017, and they should feature Kaby Lake processors and a single 400 series RealSense camera, instead of an older Skylake processor and two R200 RealSense cameras. What’s more, the final Project Alloy will support a discrete graphics card.

In past, Intel debuted several interesting tech concepts which failed to turn into real products, but, hopefully, things will be different this time around. Their partnership with Microsoft is promising and so is the concept itself. We already have lightweight mobile VR systems that offer a blurry glimpse of what VR is all about, and there’s no doubt that there will be no shortage of heavy-duty tethered systems. Project Alloy could be right in the middle, striking the perfect balance between portability and graphical fidelity.

Of course, a device that’s essentially a PC with an Intel microprocessor in it is just what the company needs to establish a foothold in the virtual reality market and ensure their revenue stream won’t dry up as our computing habits evolve and change.

Snapchat Spectacles: Smartglasses Resurrected

Written by Brooks Canavesi on . Posted in Blog, Mobile App Development, Technology trends

With headlines such as “Why I waited in line for Snapchat Spectacles” or “Hundreds brave long, cold lines to snap up Snapchat Spectacles” or even “How to Survive the Snapchat Spectacles Line,” it seems that the company behind the popular image messaging and multimedia mobile application has managed to do something unexpected: resurrect smartglasses.

“[Smartglasses] are not going to happen,” wrote Hayley Williams in her article posted in April 2016 on Gizmodo. The article contains a roundup of various Kickstarter projects, most of which live in obscurity to this day. Several commentators under the article shared her views and expressed their disinterest in the arguably dorky technology that first became available to public on May 15, 2014, with the release of Google Glass, an optical head-mounted display designed in the shape of a pair of eyeglasses.

At the time, the $1,600 gadget seemed to be spearheading an entirely new category of wearable devices, one that could fundamentally alter the way we interact with one another and the world around us. But in January 2016, Google has decided to suspend sales of Google Glass, ending the product’s brief and quite unsuccessful life. “The problems Glass created outweighed the solutions Google thought it could solve. It’s strange and unsettling to consider how disconnected Google was from the real world with Glass,” commented Nate Swanner.

Arguably, Google Glass failed as a product because of the company’s over reliance on early adopters willing to spend big bucks, developers of apps and solutions for which there was never any real audience to begin with, and support from large business partners, such as Twitter, who were all quick to drop the technology as soon as they’ve realized where it’s heading.

What the world needed wasn’t a large ecosystem and an entirely new way of living; it was merely a useful, simple-to-use product that wouldn’t be out of reach for most folks. That product is now here, and its name is Snapchat Spectacles.

Spectacles came as a surprise announcement by Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel, along with the launch of Snap, Inc., a camera company with a goal to empower people to express themselves. Priced at $130, the simple, plastic glasses with a camera inside neatly fit into the upper echelon of the impulse buy price category of novelty gadgets and toys, which is also occupied by products such as Amazon Echo and devices from Fitbit.

The idea behind the glasses is simple: you shoot a short 10- to 30-second long video clips that instantly upload to Snapchat via your smartphone. Because the camera shoots 115-degree wide-angle footage, you can view it either in landscape or portrait—the app will automatically level the view as you spin your phone around. Why would Snapchat implement a feature like this? Because it’s fun. And that’s what the glasses are all about.

There’s something captivating about capturing the world around from the eye-level perspective; something that even a GoPro mounted on the head can’t replicate. The familiar field of view brings with it an unrivaled degree of intimacy and emotional connection. Even relatively mundane, daily events are interesting to watch when replayed on your smartphone or computer, not to mention sharing them with your friends and family.

It also helps a great deal that the Snapchat Spectacles look completely non-threating, which is something Google Glass utterly failed to achieve. They are made from plastic yet well-built, have very prominent circular LED lights to let people around you know you are recording, and they even come in a colorful case that doubles as a charger. The fun design brings the best out of people, making everyone want to participate in your short snippets of recorded memories.

Snapchat has also decided to go with a very unorthodox distribution method: the Spectacles are sold through vending machines known as Snapbots. Snapbots are yellow, rectangular, vaguely resembling the Minions. These vending machines travel across the United States, never staying too long in one place. You can visit the official website of Spectacles to keep track of the Snapbot’s current location (it seems there’s just one Snapbot at the moment).

Despite everything that’s great about the product, there’s still plenty of room for improvement. The video quality could be better, it would be nice if Spectacles could shoot photos, and many people would certainly like to see a few extra styles of the glasses. But as a revival of a dying breed of wearable gadgets, Snapchat Spectacles deserve our praise.