Month: December 2001

Through both intentional and unintentional hype, Dean Kamen’s under-wraps invention (initially called “It,” and then, “Ginger”) because a subject of intense speculation as to what it acutally was earlier in the year. Now it comes out from under wraps.

It’s a seriously-cool, one-man, self-balancing, energy-efficient scooter called Segway.

(“It won’t beam you to Mars or turn lead into gold,” shrugs Kamen. “So sue me.”)

How cool is it? Check it out.

Developed at a cost of more than $100 million, Kamen’s vehicle is a complex bundle of hardware and software that mimics the human body’s ability to maintain its balance. Not only does it have no brakes, it also has no engine, no throttle, no gearshift and no steering wheel. And it can carry the average rider for a full day, nonstop, on only five cents’ worth of electricity.
[…] Kamen’s aspirations are even grander than that. He believes the Segway “will be to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy.” He imagines them everywhere: in parks and at Disneyland, on battlefields and factory floors, but especially on downtown sidewalks from Seattle to Shanghai. “Cars are great for going long distances,” Kamen says, “but it makes no sense at all for people in cities to use a 4,000-lb. piece of metal to haul their 150-lb. asses around town.” In the future he envisions, cars will be banished from urban centers to make room for millions of “empowered pedestrians”–empowered, naturally, by Kamen’s brainchild.

Kamen’s dream of a Segway-saturated world won’t come true overnight. In fact, ordinary folks won’t be able to buy the machines for at least a year, when a consumer model is expected to go on sale for about $3,000. For now, the first customers to test the Segway will be deep-pocketed institutions such as the U.S. Postal Service and General Electric, the National Parks Service and Amazon.com–institutions capable of shelling out about $8,000 apiece for industrial-strength models. And Kamen’s dreamworld won’t arrive at all unless he and his team can navigate the array of obstacles that are sure to be thrown up by competitors and ever cautious regulators.
[…] Exactly how the Segway achieves this effect isn’t easy to explain; Kamen’s first stab at it involves a blizzard of equations. Eventually, though, he offers this: “When you walk, you’re really in what’s called a controlled fall. You off-balance yourself, putting one foot in front of the other and falling onto them over and over again. In the same way, when you use a Segway, there’s a gyroscope that acts like your inner ear, a computer that acts like your brain, motors that act like your muscles, wheels that act like your feet. Suddenly, you feel like you have on a pair of magic sneakers, and instead of falling forward, you go sailing across the room.”

Of course, now is not really a good time to be throwing new technology out for sale. But, on the other hand, maybe this is the perfect time — while the economy is slowed down, people can evaluate it without it becoming “faddish,” and where coming up with cost-effectiveness is a lot more of an issue than it would have been a year ago. And it sounds like there is a hell of a lot of enthusiam among some corporate customers, which might provide the investment backbone something like this needs.

(Via Boing Boing)

Scientists are looking for ways to take reminder software and move it into the real world.

Such absent-mindedness may be frustrating to you, but to researchers and technology companies, it presents a potential market for memory aids, devices that will deliver reminders based not on calendar entries but where the user is at any given time. Unlike time-based alarms, like the ones used with a digital organizer or an e-mail program, these devices will sound off when you walk by the refrigerator, for example, or the file cabinet, reminding you of the frozen lunch or the printouts you need to carry to work.
To the scientists who are developing them, memory aids are much-needed appliances, the fruit of advances in computing that could improve the lives of many. But to critics, memory aids could well be an example of innovation driving need, an overkill of sensors and sophistication to do the work of Post-its.

I don’t know. It would be nice to be reminded, when driving past the store, that I had really wanted to pick up butter and eggs. On the other hand, being reminded of that every time I passed by the store would probably mean I would start to tune out the “alarm” — speaking from experience with various other, more conventional reminder systems.