Lecture Post 3: Bits & Bytes and Cloud Computing

MY IDEA: Swim Vision allows swimmers to literally watch their own race from an aerial view so that they can monitor the progress and speed of every single swimmer in their race. There is a tiny monitor in the goggle lenses that display the race being recorded by a camera positioned somewhere above the pool. The video being played in the lenses will be transparent so that the swimmers can still see where he/she is going. If the screen is too distracting, however, swimmers have the option to turn off the video or they will receive alerts that flashing across the screen with messages such as “approaching wall” or “flip turn in 5 yards.” Swim Vision will have two different modes, “Competition Mode” and “Practice Mode.”

LECTURE

            Swim Vision is capable of utilizing two topics that we have recent discussed in lecture. These goggles will require the usage of “bits and bytes” as well as cloud computing. The bits and bytes would primarily be used in the “Practice Mode” when the goggles display stats such as laps completed, heart rate, speed, time, calories burned, etc. and cloud computing can be used to share the information stored within the goggles. Without this class, I probably would have never thought that a simple pair of goggles would have so much potential to be such a technologically savvy device.

            The bits and bytes would be used to both store information as well as display the text on the display screen within the goggles. They would use the ASCII character set (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), which is the most commonly used to display words of the English alphabet on computers and other communication devices. Certain numbers correspond with certain letters (there are 127 of them). Without bits and bytes, the text displayed in the goggles would not be able to appear. These binary codes would also serve to store the information so that the swimmers can access them later and evaluate their progress.

            Although this may sound like a stretch, I think it would be interesting for Swim Vision to be able to take advantage of cloud computing. The goggles could utilize “the cloud” to allow the different goggles to communicate with each other and share information such as times (“splits”: the time it takes a swimmer to complete each lap within a race) and calories burned to compare them to other swimmers. This sharing of information would have to be done in the cloud. The information could then be accessed from a real computer, not in the goggles. This does not necessarily have to be a real feature on the goggles since it is so farfetched, but I hope that this serves to demonstrate my knowledge on how these new technologies we are learning about could apply to my entrepreneurial ideas.