There are two things about consumer technology that irks me every now and then. The first is that the engineer product often doesn't take into account that there are people who wear glasses---VR headsets and over-the-ear headphones are the biggest culprits. The other is the poor choice of [plastic] materials/engineering design that cannot survive well in a place that is not using the mostly-temperature climate notion of room temperature (and humidity).
Guess where I am staying and whether I'm wearing glasses.
For the issue on poor choice of materials and engineering design, I suspect that cost-cutting is the main driving force. The engineering required to ensure a system can cool itself in an environment with an ambient temperature of at least 28 °C and relative humidity of more than 60% is likely to be non-trivial, because the thermal mass and temperature differential is much smaller than if one were to assume a cooler 20 °C environment with dry-ish air of 40% humidity. This means that most designs actually have a lower practical thermal energy movement power as compared to the stated rating. This is bad, and it results in the type of stupid activity that I need to take to ensure that Eileen-II doesn't burn herself down. Intel's ``Thermal Velocity Boost'' feature is an example of the type of tone-deaf engineering choice that clearly is optimising for cooler climates (where they can dump excess thermal energy more efficiently into the air) without caring about the hot and humid climate where most of the under-developed and developing world lives.
Another issue with poor choice of materials and engineering design lies with the plastics. Plastics are a more general form of polymers, and they have various modes of decomposition, with most of them relating to excess energy being applied to it in the form of heat and UV-light.
Guess what do we have an abundance of in the tropics.
On the side topic of plastics/polymers, I just want to point out that wood and other plant-based structures are often the traditional materials used for what plastics are currently covering as their niche areas. These are more renewable than plastics are (plastics come from oil), but with the scale of decades as compared to millions of years, the absolute difference does not impress anyone. This can be a post for another day.
As for glasses-wearing folks and consumer electronics... that's very specific for me, I agree. But the general idea of engineering for accesibility is often something that is done as an afterthought rather than being a part of the original technological drive. That is worthy of another post in the future (I need to remember these).
There are two solutions for glasses-wearing folks, but they are both based on the same general idea---remove the spectacles themselves, either through the use of contact lenses, or some kind of eye surgery to remove the need for glasses.
Those solutions don't solve the problem for those with really bad eyesight though. I should know---I am one of them. Don't let the relatively thin lenses of my glasses confuse you---I already did eye surgery to reduce the refractive error that is needed to be corrected. That was how bad it was. Contact lenses don't work well for me because of the high risk of corneal abrasion.
Thankfully, VR headsets are not in my sights---using them requires space that is often really hard to find especially in SIN.
I have thought of an alternative for the over-the-ears headphone problem though---it is the use of the pince-nez type glasses, where there are no ear hooks. Without the ear hooks, the over-the-ear headphones can seal more comfortably around the ear while still providing good corrected vision.
The only problem is that pince-nezes are basically considered quaint and vintage articles nowadays. And even if one could find a frame, the know-how on how to set the lens correctly for that particular mechanism may be partially lost as well.
Speaking of headphones, I found that when I had the standing fan blowing at me directly from a distance of less than one metre at full speed, ``full noise cancelling mode'' triggers additional white noise. Ironically, ``low noise concelling mode'' did a much better job at filtering out the turbulence sounds of the fan while still keeping all other external sounds at bay.
Very interesting observation.
Anyway, till the next update.
No comments:
Post a Comment