People buy smartwatches like the Apple Watch and cannot even tell you why they did it. They spend their time coming up with ridiculous justifications why that gadget was worth buying and what it does for them – while, in fact, they only use it as a simple watch and let themselves be annoyed by email notifications that they don’t even need.
There simply is no convincing use case for smartwatches and nobody has come up with a killer application for them yet.
Gadgets like Microsoft HoloLens or Google Glass are a completely different story.
Google, unfortunately, has burned too much time turning Glass into yet another consumer-compatible thing that serves no purpose that a smartphone couldn’t already do for you. Except for the usual notification annoyances, all they came up with was using the thing as yet another camera or navigational system.
Microsoft at least is looking a lot into medical and industrial use cases for their gadget and is trying to come up with innovations that help people in work environments. They don’t position it as a useless consumer gadget, and that is a good strategy.
However, I’m missing some of the more obvious things here: Where’s the subtitles app for the hearing impaired?
I’m in the unfortunate situation that I need hearing aids. According to recent tests, the “speech recognition software” that nature has implanted into my brain is down to 60% comprehension. It has become real work for me to follow a vocal conversation, meetings are extremely tough and conversations in open places have become something of a punishment. When I watch movies in the original language, I never had a problem with the vocabulary – but understanding a spoken word was a challenge, so I only watch movies with subtitles in the same language.
Now what I would willingly pay money for is a product like HoloLens that translates spoken language – or even lip-reading – into subtitles displayed near the person that is speaking.
That would be a real killer app for a wearable gadget.