PeteM wrote:
I can see durability being a problem. Smoke gets into everything eventually. And the general beating that things can take in an industrial environment. It would definitely have to have the ability to work au naturalle in the event of a failure of the electronic components.
Yup.. Indeed..
That's always the hardest part of new technology. Getting it to a point where it's fully developed into a mass-market product that's cheap to manufacture and durable enough to be sufficient. (everything is 'lifed' these days.. no longer are products over-built like they were in the past.. pity, but that's how it is..)
Thinking of an idea and making some working prototype takes a lot of time, cleverness and effort, but when you look at actual on the shelf products there's usually a massive amount of (re)development work needed to bring an idea/prototype into a state where it can be manufactured easily and cheaply using the available factory equipment.
And a lot of ideas/prototypes fail at this hurdle as it often turns out they use something or some principle where we don't have good mass-production capabilities yet or the per-product cost simply remains too high to be economically feasible.
Electronic devices are a clear/good example of this and easy to see the process in action as their life-cycle is so short, but often a new device that comes onto the market will start out to be very expensive and probably break quite quickly but may draw in early adopters as it's 'new'.
If it does take off (enough) then any further iteration will improve production yields at reduced cost and see the price drop (usually massively) and the quality improve although the process may also change the actual product while still performing the same 'task'.
Flat-screen TV's are a prime example. Starting out commercially with plasma units these (slowly) gained traction and they got better/cheaper over time. Initial ones often had big problems and were hugely expensive in both cost to buy and in power draw.
But then others started exploring different routes like LCD and improving that and it turned out to be a lot easier/cheaper to build on a massive scale and prices plummeted until now they are dirt cheap and the 'new kid' are the oLED displays that are starting to show a similar trend.
We still see a flat panel display, but the technology behind an early plasma and a current oLED is radically and fundamentally different.
So in these cases things like augmented reality welding helmets will likely be fragile, complex and very, very expensive initially but over time may well end up at a price point a little over a normal auto-darkening one.
Although those products may well technically operate quite differently from the original version, but get/produce the same result. Something you'd need a crystal ball to know beforehand..
Probably won't be sold any cheaper as it's something 'extra' that people are likely willing to pay a little more for. (but that discussion moves into the realm of economics and profit margins
)
Bye, Arno.
in that thing though).
