@Speelgoedmannetje
x86 is not the devil. Do you dislike the architecture due to its place in history or for more technical reasons?
Having said that, building a wearable Minimig is my personal dream for the device, here's hoping this becomes a reality.
@Dan
I haven't been following wearable computing closely for 10 years like you, but I do know progress has been slow. The main barriers to more commercial devices (IMO) are:
1. Getting enough computing power in a small form factor (now solved with mobile-ITX).
2. Increasing battery life (bottleneck in many mobile devices, progress very slow but power efficiency making some improvements).
3. Building suitable input and output devices.
Point 3 is most interesting. I liked your ideas about a new UI, never thought of using a wristwatch as small display when HUD not suitable. When using HUD, maybe you could use the wristwatch surface as a touchpad (i.e. mouse replacement)?
For typing, I thought of a solution, though I'm not sure if it would take off. To type, you would wear gloves (wouldn't need any computer hardware in the gloves, but they would need to be of one fixed colour, green let's say). Wearing the HUD, you look down at your hands. The HUD device would have a camera built in, and when it saw the green gloves it would bring up the keyboard interface on screen as a augmented reality object. Typing would work as normal, though sounds would have to be added to give feedback when a key was successfully pressed. When typing was finished, you could look up to take away the virtual keyboard.
I think this keyboard solution would only be suitable for people when they were sitting down. If people tried to type like this whilst walking along it wouldn't be long before the term 'techno-zombie' would be in widespread use!
