Daniel Gross doubts the staying power of wearable tech (such as the Dish-covered Google Glass, Pebble, Fitbit, and, most recently, Durr and Tikker):
The real money in technology lies in creating entirely new classes of products, forging new markets, and making people realize they have been missing certain things in their lives. But it’s not clear that wearable technology can be that thing. Sure, the young market could blow to become the next smartphone—a mass industry that creates its own economic ecosystem. Or it could be develop into a series of niche products that add up to a bunch of good businesses and a bunch of failed ones. Or it could be a fad that will fade like the Macarena.
My money’s on the second option. Consider the smartphone.
Sure, skeptics abounded that the expensive iPhone and its imitators would become the new standard. But smartphones represented important innovations to a series of mass behaviors. Before the iPhone came along, people were carrying music around, making phone calls and taking photos, sending email, playing games, and accessing information and services on the internet with hand-held devices. Hundreds of millions of people were accustomed to toting these objects around, plugging them in to recharge them, and using them. Smartphones were just a much better, more convenient, all-in-one version of a bunch of popular devices. Switching to smartphones didn’t require a big change in consumer behavior.
But wearable technology promoters are asking much more of their customers. They are asking them to develop new habits very quickly, and to stick with them. The idea behind many wearable tech products is not simply to sell the hardware, but also to sell services like, say, diet and exercise advice to go along with your Up band. But that requires people to incorporate these gadgets into their daily lives in a way that they haven’t before.
Marcus Wohlsen argues that work, not leisure, is where these devices will make a lasting impact:
Take Eyes-On, the smart glasses Epson made with Evena Medical [featured in the above video]. Designed especially for nurses, the Android-based system lets the wearer, in effect, see through the skin of patients to get a precise real-time map of their veins. Health care workers no longer have to guess where to stick the needle when they set an IV or draw blood.
“It comes down to being relevant by vertical, by job function,” [analyst J.P.] Gownder says, noting Eyes-On is “definitely not” a consumer device. As soon as businesses find a specific way wearables can enhance the work they do, he explains, they will rush to adopt such devices.
Those uses aren’t limited to things so serious as medical care. Gownder gives the example of the cable guy who comes to fix a faulty connection. If a technician can’t figure out the problem, he or she typically has to come back for a second visit. With Looxcie’s Vidcie head-mounted camera, the technician can send live streaming video of the problem to other technicians and get real-time advice on how to fix it. Suddenly, two annoying days spent waiting for the cable guy have been cut to one.
The Dish 