Judges' Feedback

Photo on the rooftop of Art Center's Media Design Practices Wind Tunnel in Pasadena, CA, of Christian Denhart, Eric Lewallen, Marcus Filipovich, Anne Burdick & Maggie Hendrie, announcing the awards for MDP's Extreme Wearables Designathon

XWD @ MDP jurors Christian Denhart, Eric Lewallen, Marcus Filipovich, Anne Burdick & Maggie Hendrie, announce the awards!

I had a chance to see a video of the XWD awards presentation on the MDP rooftop. I’m not posting it here as it was a private video. I’ll add it if it becomes public. We pretty much know what happened anyway, but what was interesting about this replay was that 3 teams got awards, but only 1 team got Award + Critique: us!

In 3rd place, recognized for the quality of their prototype and their thinking and the thoroughness with which they developed their idea, we have the team Compass H2O.

The judges want to encourage you to take your idea further, to explore beyond simply just the wrist, and to consider building out your scenario and the wayfinding aspect of it.

So they love our wearable, just not on the wrist, and not for finding water! 😛

Off the Wrist?

photo of various wearables from Polar, Fitbit, Garmin, etc

Too many devices competing for space on our wrists?

The funny thing about wrist or not is… on Saturday Samy was really pushing for a wrist-compass, and I was totally enamored with shoes. I already forget exactly how everyone else felt, but I recall Natalia saying how much she loooooved the idea of shoes, but, that they added so much complexity that she had to agree with Samy. k, that’s not the “funny” part. The funny part is that maybe a little like a religious convert who becomes more zealous and proselytizing than someone born in the faith, once the decision was made, I started to find a wrist-wearable more and more compelling. I admit now I’m sort of reluctant to pull back.

Wayfinding & Sensors

photo of a Garmin chest strap heartrate monitor

What about a chest strap like popular heartrate monitors? It’s a fairly convenient place. We might sense several body states. We’d have a bit more room than on the wrist. And for studly boys without shirts or girls in stylish sports tops, we might yet have LEDs! 🙂

I know Anne Burdick has expressed that the wrist is going to become such a competitive piece of real estate. Perhaps it is over obvious? Are there other choices beyond wrist or shoes? Everything else does seem more complex both to engineer and perhaps also in wearing. Meanwhile Maggie Hendrie really loves this device and the wayfinding aspects, but doesn’t really buy the water finding use case for either the developed or developing world. She does however like sensing hydration level. And perhaps sensing other body states as well. Thinking about phones again, this is a case that’s more complex in the developing world, but if you assume a smartphone, then it could do a lot of processing of data a worn sensor collects. Perhaps something like that hydration sensing “band-aid” we looked at.

WearableTechLA

In terms of WearableTechLA IDK what’s possible. We do have 2 weeks, and 2 weekends till the event. But I also know we’re all pretty busy. Perhaps we’ll need to mostly present what we’ve already got? IDK if we’ll have any further support from MDP, I imagine we’ll hear something on WTLA from them pretty soon. We do all have 1 week free passes to MakerCityLA, so if schedules allowed some of us could meetup there one weekend and work.

wearable tech photoPhoto by vintagedept

Photo by IntelFreePress

Photo by mikkelz