Accessing a car

I was talking to some colleagues this week about the coming age of wearables. The combination of high bandwidth wireless connectivity with lightweight wearables with computation in the cloud is going to change a lot of things.

But it isn’t sufficient just to have the technology. There also needs to be a layer over that technology which makes it extremely easy and intuitive to use.

There is an analogy with cars. In the early days of automobiles, the fundamental technology was all there, including internal combustion engines, transmissions, suspensions, four tires, and paved roads, was well as a means of steering, accelerating and braking.

But you couldn’t just get in a car and drive. In order to get anywhere you needed to really know what you were doing.

The oil needed to be checked, the sparks had to heat up, and you needed to know just how to crank that engine to get her started. And if you did that last thing wrong, it could spin back and break your arm.

The interface was not really intuitive, because it was all new. Many millions of users and multiple iterations later, things finally settled down, and cars became a lot easier to drive.

The stuff you shouldn’t need to worry about all disappeared behind the scenes. Meanwhile, the stuff that you really should be worrying about — like not driving off the road or rear-ending the car in front of you — became a lot more streamlined and easier to manage.

The same thing is going to happen with those future wearables. At first they will be something you “access”, the way you now access the interface in a VR headset. There will be all sorts of controls that somebody thought would be important, but that will eventually turn out not to be.

And then one day it will all get sorted out. You won’t need to “access” your glasses, you will just put them on, like you put on a pair of prescription glasses today. They won’t vie for your attention, they will just make it easier and less stressful for you to get through your day.

But don’t expect that to happen right away.