a new age of mobile computing/ Microvision

It's Not About Money

It's about evolution. It's about becoming more than what we are. This is about change on the scale of entire societies. Microvision has done numerous studies that demonstrate that using their displays make people performing certain tasks dramatically more productive. Those kinds of productivity gains scale up. They can transform economies.

The thing is, that it is not just about auto technicians, or factory workers, or pilots -- although there are obvious reasons why these verticals have been targeted initially for products using our technology. The target market for this company is every single person in the civilized world.

It's not just about entertainment. It's about access to information on a global scale. A phenomenon that came out of nowhere with the emergence and astonishing power of the internet, and now pervasive cell phones, GPS units, and on and on.

What is the value of access to information in a head-up, hands-free configuration? Given the right infrastructure for ubiquitous mobile computing, it could be larger than anyone is imagining right now.

Augmented reality for consumers is right around the corner. My best guess (well, actually, it's Ray Kurzweil's best guess) is that by 2009, augmented reality is a major market force and that the infrastructure to provide personalized, location-based information in a head-up display is an industry collectively worth trillions of dollars.

Railroads, automobiles, telephones, computers, internet, cell phones...it doesn't stop here. It just keeps going. It keeps changing and growing and becoming something larger and more significant all the while. The next steps are obvious. Augmented reality and virtual reality technologies will take hold and make a joke out of the concept of 'information overload' circa 2005.

It's a law of nature. People are obsessive in their pursuit of smaller, faster, cheaper -- and the need to be always on, always connected, always fed.

Maybe it is about money on some levels. They're not going to continue to build ever faster wireless data transfer systems just for the fun of it. But build them they will. To me, it is more about the intrepid need to explore the limits, the edges of our abilities and once having reached them, to stretch them further out. Human beings with access to the world's wealth of information will be smarter and more capable and more productive than those without.

That is what Microvision represents to me: the opportunity to change the world in a fundamental way. To deliver information in a way that no one else can, due to the inherent advantages of a scanning beam versus a fixed pixel. To transform society and enable economic growth on a massive scale by ushering in a new age of mobile computing, manifesting initally in augmented and virtual realities.
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The world is beating a path to our door. They need us to enable the next-generation of their devices. Devices that are small enough to fit in your pocket, but convey a big screen experience, or overlay daylight-readable information on your regular field of vision. These are capabilities unique to Microvision. These are capabilities that I believe will be critical to innumerable consumer devices in the next five years.
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posted by BJ # 4:52 PM 0 comments
Thursday, July 21, 2005

+ Source: Microvision (MVIS) Blog here