Smart Everything: A Visit To The NYC Wearable Tech Expo

The game was made possible thanks to Augumenta, a new software that “augments” smart glasses, like Google Glass, by projecting customized buttons and displays. The program uses computer image recognition to recognize the user’s hand—say, to put a keypad on it. When your finger rests on one button longer than the others, the system reads that as “pressing” the key. The Augumenta team envisions its platform being adapted for thousands of different uses: Retail employees could use it to take inventory, or surgeons could use it for hands-free controls during surgery. The system still needs a bit of work—to play rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock, you have to be sure to hold your hand at a certain distance away from your eye—but it’s a truly cool step towards “augmented reality.”

Wearable tech is a pretty big tent, covering everything from smart glasses to fitness wristbands that track your activity and send it to a connected app, and portable speakers packed into a purse (all of which were on display at the Expo this week). There’s also smart clothes that measure your heart rate (by far one of the most popular measurements at the Expo), smart temporary tattoos, and smart shoes that connect to Google Maps and let you know what street to turn on while you’re out walking to an unfamiliar place. If it can be attached to a human, you can put a chip in it, basically. The market for all these kinds of devices is thought to be worth about $5 billion in 2014 alone, and is expected to climb to more than $70 billion by 2024.

A Life Jacket For Your Phone

But many in the industry think that in order for these smart accessories to take off, they have to become attached to our hips (or wrists, or what have you). For every person that  wears their Fitbit wristband, there’s another person that tries it for a little while and eventually relegates it to a nightstand drawer.

“We have to have the ‘always on’ mentality,” says Chris Weed of HZO. This Utah-based company makes waterproof coatings that can be applied directly to electronics—at the Expo, the HZO booth featured a Raspberry Pi computer submerged in a water tank, still able to run a video display on a nearby TV screen. A Samsung smartphone also kept running normally in the same water tank.

To make electronic components waterproof, HZO uses small gas chamber to coat them in a hydrophobic (water-repelling) chemical cocktail that eventually settles into a nanoscale-thickness film over the device. By making wearables impervious to water, Weed says, people will feel more comfortable keeping them close all the time. No taking a smart watch off to shower, or to swim, so there’s less forgetting to put the device back on. And dropping one’s phone into a puddle would no longer be a catastrophic event.

A Camera Between Your Eyes

When most people think smart glasses, Google Glass probably comes to mind. But Google’s headset fills one particular niche; if you’re looking to record lots of video, its short battery life is less than ideal. For the gadgetheads that want point-of-view footage, there’s Pivothead, which makes special glasses with a camera in the center of the nosepiece. Pivothead’s current model shoots 1080p video and has been out on the market for about two years; in November, the company will be introducing its second generation, the SMART glasses, which have special components to clip on to the ends of the earpieces—a pack for extra battery life, a pack that allows you to livestream, and more.

Pivothead’s glasses have been used by the New York Times to capture a jockey’s-eye-view of a horse race, andby professional sports teams in order to give fans a player’s perspective of training. Pivothead CEO Christopher Cox thinks sports events might someday incorporate player’s eye views that could be shown up on the Jumbotron inside the arena or ballpark.

“Nowadays you’ve got incredible home theaters that are tough to beat,” Cox said. “Stadiums are needing to come up with a better and more interactive environment.”

A Coach On Your Wrist

Athletics were by far the most prevalent type of wearable technology on display at the Javits Center for the first two days of the Expo. Sports giant Adidas showed off a system called miCoach that encompasses a variety of devices, from wristband and waistband trackers, a smart watch specifically designed for runners to help track pacing, distance traveled, and heart rate, and a smart soccer ball with an integrated sensor that measures the speed and trajectory of a kick.

Adidas also has an Elite version of the miCoach system that gathers data and generates stats for a whole team of players. During practice, the team wears undershirts with integrated sensors that measure heart rate, along with a small tracker device clipped between the shoulder blades, under the jersey. From an iPad, the team’s coach can see where players travel over the field, how hard they’re working, and how efficient they are. According to Adidas vice president Qaizar Hassonjee, 30 elite soccer teams are using this system in training—including the recent World Cup champions, the German national team.

Part of the strength of the miCoach system, Hassonjee says, is that it combines and translates lots of different types of raw sensor data into easily-understandable concepts. For instance, judging players based on whose heart rate gets highest during a workout won’t necessarily tell you who’s working the hardest; a player that’s fitter may work even harder with a lower heart rate. Incorporating details like speed and power gives a fuller picture.

“It’s not about the data, it’s about the analysis, and the insights you get from that,” says Hassonjee.

The Stonecrysus activity tracker

Some products at the Expo are arriving on the market within the next year; many are components in search of larger companies looking to incorporate them into existing devices. By next year’s Expo, wearable tech may be even more ubiquitous, in the form of smart watches: Apple is rumored to be developing an iWatch, and Google already has a wearable version of the Android operating system already in use. The revolution may not be televised, but it could come strapped to your wrist.