2013 is The Year of Wearable Tech!

The sensors and computing power we've become accustomed to in our smartphones are starting to migrate to body-worn devices used for new purposes.

Google has stoked excitement for the category after teasing its forthcoming Project Glass headset, but it already faces competition from Vuzix which has been showing off its own Android-powered eyewear at this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

 Mr Travers believes smart headsets may replace many 

users' phones within the next decade

The lightweight kit places a tiny widescreen colour monitor in front of the user's right eye so that it appears to hover towards the top of their field of vision.

Users control it by pressing buttons placed close to their ear, or via a smartphone paired via Bluetooth.

Initial features are set to include the ability to stream and record video - but the US company's boss suggests developers will soon exploit the hardware for other uses.

"You like Guinness and you are in New York city - you could say to your glasses 'Is there stout around here?'," chief executive Paul Travers gives as an example.

"The app kicks in, the camera feeds out and you see an arrow showing which way to go.

"Another possibility would be: you are in France, you go into a restaurant and look at the menu and the glasses translates it for you."

The public will have to wait to see if it fulfils its potential when the M100 headset launches this summer.

Runner's readout

In the meantime another heads-up display has just gone on sale in the US.

Sports visor Screeneye X is designed to measure athletic activity

O-synce's Screeneye X is a sports visor with a built-in display that shows two numbers in green in the style of a digital watch. They can be set to represent a runner's speed, heart rate, lap time, distance travelled or other data measured by sensors connected to the visor by a radio link.

Professional athletes have trained with computers for years, but Stephen Maris - the man in charge of the launch - says it's social media that has helped make the innovation ready to be pitched to the public.

"People like to share what they're doing and by getting it digitised they can do that very easily via sites like Strava," he says.

"You can then use this data to compare your performance to your friends' and anyone who has done the same routes."

Smart watch

It's early days but this kind of product could become big business.

Tech consultancy iSuppli suggests that by 2016 more than 92 million wearable technology devices will be sold a year.

Nearly 70,000 people backed the Pebble watch on Kickstarter

It's not just about headsets.

Pebble Technology is also at CES to publicise the impending release of its smart watch. The wrist-worn computer will run apps on its e-paper display - a feature chosen to ensure it can be read in sunlight - and go a week without recharge,

It appears there is demand for such a device. When the developers turned to crowdfunding site Kickstarter to raise $100,000 (£62,000) they ended up with over $10m.

"We've seen firsthand that there is a huge demand for mobile companions that make email notifications, messages, alerts and more easily accessible," says chief executive Eric Migicovsky.

"I am confident that smart watches and similar wearable devices will grow to be an important part of our daily lives."

Studying skateboarders

Over at Xsens' booth a model wearing 15 sensors on different parts of her body strikes a pose.

Xsens's tech tracks accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer sensors

On a screen behind her a computer animated figure made up of small dots matches her moves.

The kit and software are a spin-off of the Netherlands-based firm's motion capture technology, originally developed for movies including The Avengers and Ted.

The idea is to offer consumers a chance to digitise their actions and play them back as 3D graphics to help perfect their skills.

One ready-made market, suggests chief technology officer Per Slycke, would be new skateboarders and other extreme sports enthusiasts.

He's at CES to find third-parties wishing to license the tech and use it to take advantage of the growing number of products built with activity trackers inside.

"They're in helmets, watches, bracelets and sports shoes," he says.

"With our software you can add intelligence to data that is already being collected. The challenge is to present it to the user in a meaningful way."

Lost and found

One sign that a technology is going mainstream is when it starts targeting pets and children.

That's the case with StickNFind - circular stickers the size of a few 10p pieces stuck together which contain a Bluetooth chip, temperature sensor and battery.

They are designed to be used with a smartphone app which shows a radar image covering a 200ft (61m) radius.

Cats wearing a Sticknfind sticker should find it harder to hide from their owners

Stick it on the cat's collar, the company suggests, and it becomes much easier to locate the moggy when trying to lock up a house.

Perhaps more usefully it can also be used by parents to keep track of their kids in public by sending an alert if they are wander off.

Co-founder Jimmy Buchheim says the innovation was inspired by an incident involving his eldest daughter.

"When she was three years old, she decided to play hide-and-seek in a department store," he says. "She hid behind some boxes.

"They had to close the section down and everyone was looking for her. Imagine if I had had this sticker - I would have found her immediately."

If the launches and previews at CES are anything to go by, the wearable tech revolution is just getting under way. [BBC]

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How to Turn Your Old iPod or iPad WiFi Into a Full Fledged SatNav

Wondering what to do with that old iPod touch that’s just sitting in your drawer? Plug in the Bad Elf GPS dongle and your old media player or Wi-Fi-only iPad transforms into a full satnav.

The tiny coin-sized Bad Elf GPS slots straight into the dock connector of your data-less iOS device, giving it an extra lease of life, and comes bundled with CoPilot GPS software, which lets you store maps on the device, unlike Google Maps.

That means it can turn your Wi-Fi only iPad or iPod touch into a mean GPS for around $99 (£62) and does a lot more than a fussy dedicated satnav with an unresponsive screen. The Bad Elf also has a USB port underneath so it can pass through juice from an in-car charger, keeping your iPad or iPod alive while you drive or just to sync.

It doesn’t just work with CoPilot, mind: it can also be used with different navigation apps, like Navigon, Garmin or TomTom’s iOS software. The CoPilot bundle is only available in the US right now, but the Bad Elf itself is available over here.

Fancy turning your old iPod touch into a handy satnav, or are you sticking to your standard GPS? Let us know what you think in the comments. [GadgetShow]

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How Hardware Startups Changed The Essence Of CES

It was all bad timing, really. Just ahead of CES 2012, Microsoft announced that year's event would be its last, blaming product schedules that just didn't match up with the annual show. There was no question that the tech giant's absence would be felt the following year, the first time in recent memory the Consumer Electronics Show wasn't kicked off by a Microsoft keynote. It signaled, perhaps, a slight shift away from the days of huge companies dominating the event's headlines -- a phenomenon helped along by the recent attention-grabbing successes of a number of crowdfunded projects, many of which were present at the show.

The move from Bill Gates to Steve Ballmer was one thing, but a CES without Redmond? That was just unheard of, a specter that loomed over the show, even as the CEA happily announced it had sold out the company's floor space in "record time." In the end, of course, Microsoft was still at the show, albeit in a less overt form, by way of third-party machines from Sony, Samsung and the like, and in the form of a cameo by none other than Ballmer himself -- a sort of spiritual baton-passing to the company's keynote successor, Qualcomm. Heck, even the Surface Pro reared its head backstage at the show.

Timing, too, played havoc with this year's mobile announcements, with many manufacturers holding off news until next month's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Even RIM opted to forgo the CES press conference, choosing to hold its own event to launch its long-awaited BlackBerry 10 operating system, later this month, and joining in on a larger industry trend of breaking away from the industry's noisiest week.

The relative absence of mobile announcements from the major players in the US market (even Sony, which debuted the Xperia Z, opted not to make the device a centerpiece of its press conference) allowed manufacturers like ZTE and Huawei, largely unknown in the States, to hog the mobile spotlight. Instead, focus from the majors was on the world of Ultra HD, a fact that highlighted one of the biggest concerns with these sorts of shows: product overlap. It's hard not to notice when two of the biggest companies at a show use it as a platform to make a big deal about 65- and 55-inch versions of previously announced 84-inch sets.

But the vacuum of excitement created by the major players contributed to a perfect storm of sorts, mingling with the on-going explosion of crowdfunded projects put into play by the likes of Kickstarter and Indiegogo. The real stars of the show weren't the multinational corporations, but rather the startups that couldn't necessarily afford the astronomical fees required to set up a booth at a show like this. And while this certainly wasn't the first year that crowdfunding has had a presence at the event, there was a sense that 2013 was the year that it truly came into its own, delivering the promise of real, marketable hardware, rather than the sort of vaporware that seems ever-present at CES.

No better was this demonstrated than with the Pebble smartwatch, the Kickstarter phenomenon that seemingly managed to drum up as much excitement as one of those high-end TV sets the majors were hawking. What these projects lack in resource infrastructure, they make up for in adaptability, producing genuinely unique takes on the tech space. It's hard to imagine major corporations experimenting with products as they launch press conferences and ad campaigns designed to pat themselves on the back for adding a few fractions of an inch to a smartphone screen.

Then there were the 3D printers making a big showing compared to the year prior, in which MakerBot unveiled the only high-profile entry in the space. This year, 3D Systems gave the company a run for its money, in the form of the portable Cube (which employees were carrying strapped to their chests while walking the show floor) and the CubeX, with its enormous basketball-sized build platform. Kickstarted company Formlabs, meanwhile, showed off the massively impressive FORM 1, which could bring pro-level 3D printing into the home. The success of such products has contributed to the hardware explosion in their own right, offering up the capability of rapid prototyping in a home environment. Bre Pettis showed us the Square Helper, a credit card iPad accessory that one 3D printer owner is selling -- an example of the "desktop industrial revolution," the MakerBot CEO loves to talk about.

And if CES can be regarded as a sort of testing ground for those far-off conceptual products like the foldable display, crowdfunding has that very thing built-in. If users don't support a product, it doesn't get made.

"Crowdfunding is a natural," SticknFind creator Jimmy Buchheim told us during an interview. "It allows us to bring products to market fast and lets us know whether the products are good or (if we have to) go back to the drawing board."

And certainly there's a lot to be said for the sort of pre-show buzz such campaigns can elicit -- there weren't too many projects that we were more excited to play around with in the lead up to the show than the Oculus Rift.

It will be fascinating to watch how such a shift will affect the show moving ahead. If small companies continue to draw as much or more attention than the big guns by walking the floor in hopes of meeting press members and buyers, it may impact the amount of money they will actually spend to exhibit. The hidden treasures have always been a highlight of shows like CES, but 2013's event seems to have signaled a shift toward a potential future in which they are the focal point.

It's a trend we certainly welcome, both with regards to the slight leveling of the playing field it brings to hardware startups and, perhaps, toward a push for creative thinking amongst the larger companies moving ahead. Hopefully the CEA will expand its effort to embrace these small companies, as well. If the big manufacturers continue to commit to launching products on their own terms, at their own events, crowdfunded companies and their ilk may well prove to be the future of CES. [Engadget]

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