Jewelry is worn for many reasons -- for aesthetics, to impress others, or as a symbol of affiliation or commitment.
Today, manufacturers can place millions of transistors on a microchip, which can be used to make small devices that store tons of digital data. Researchers have already created an array of digital-jewelry prototypes. "We've made one of almost everything except tongue rings," says Dan Russell, senior manager of IBM's Almaden Research Lab, where IBM is developing digital-jewelry technology.
Wonderful example (Digital Jewellary Cell phone)
Instead of one single device, cell phones will be broken up into their basic components and packaged as various pieces of digital jewelry. Each piece of jewelry will contain a fraction of the components found in a conventional mobile phone, according to IBM. Together, the digital-jewelry cell phone should work just like a conventional cell phone.
Let's look at the various components that are
inside a cell phone
- Microphone
- Receiver
- Touchpad
- Display
- Circuit board
- Antenna
- Battery
IBM has developed a prototype of a cell phone that consists of several pieces of digital jewelry that will work together wirelessly, possibly with
Bluetooth wireless technology, to perform the functions of the above components.
Here are the pieces of IBM's computerized-jewelry phone and their functions:
- Earrings - Speakers embedded into these earrings will be the phone's receiver.
- Necklace - Users will talk into the necklace's embedded microphone.
- Ring - Perhaps the most interesting piece of the phone, this "magic decoder ring" is equipped with light-emitting diodes (LEDs) that flash to indicate an incoming call. It can also be programmed to flash different colors to identify a particular caller or indicate the importance of a call.
- Bracelet - Equipped with a video graphics array (VGA) display, this wrist display could also be used as a caller identifier that flashes the name and phone number of the caller.
With a jewelry phone, the keypad and dialing function could be integrated into the bracelet, or else dumped altogether -- it's likely that voice-recognition software will be used to make calls .
IBM is also working on a miniature rechargeable battery to power these components.
- Imagine that the same ring that flashes for phone calls could also inform you that e-mail is piling up in your inbox.
- IBM is also working to shrink the computer mouse to the size of a ring and create a wrist-worn display.
- In the coming age of ubiquitous computing, displays will no longer be tied to desktops or wall screens. Instead, you'll wear the display like a pair of sunglasses or a bracelet.
Charmed Technology is already marketing its digital jewelry, including a futuristic-looking eyepiece display. The eyepiece is the display component of the company's
Charmed Communicator, a wearable, wireless, broadband-Internet device that can be controlled by voice, pen or handheld keypad.
The Java Ring
The Java Ring is a stainless-steel ring, 16-millimeters (0.6 inches) in diameter, that houses a 1-million-transistor processor, called an iButton. The ring has 134 KB of RAM, 32 KB of ROM, a real-time clock and a Java virtual machine, which is a piece of software that recognizes the Java language and translates it for the user's computer system. At Celebration School, the rings have been programmed to store electronic cash to pay for lunches, automatically unlock doors, take attendance, store a student's medical information and allow students to check out books. All of this information is stored on the ring's iButton. Students simply press the signet of their Java Ring against the Blue Dot receptor, and the system connected to the receptor performs the function that the applet instructs it to. In the future, the Java Ring may start your car. |