This article, by wearable computing enthusiast Cliff Leong, describes the history, evolution, and future plans of the Ripley project, which has the goal of building “an anytime, anywhere general purpose computer that is efficient enough to run on consumer grade batteries for several hours, small and light enough to wear on the body, wirelessly connected to the Internet at all times, and easy to interact… with even while doing other things.” Leong writes . . .

“Existing computing devices, such as laptop computers and PDAs, were unsatisfactory. Laptops are just small desktop computers with the same modality of use. Users of laptops need to be in 'laptop mode' — sitting with the laptop balanced on their laps and their attention focused on its screen and keyboard. In order to do something else, they then need to break away from laptop mode — which makes it difficult to continue to interact with the laptop. PDAs, on the other hand, were simply not robust enough to handle most of the situations we envisioned.”

“Therefore, we set out to create something new: open sourced, wearable computing . . .”

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