Mrs. Peel,
<<I watched Diane Sawyer run over a guys foot and almost fall off herself...<g>>>
Yes, even Diane has to obey the laws of physics! She sure scared the hell out of Dean Kamen, didn't she? That's all he needed, Diane Sawyer getting herself thrown off Segway by centrifugal force on the day of Ginger's unveiling. If she wouldn't have had her leg trailing behind her like some ice rink queen I don't think that would have happened.
Well, we didn't see the Stirling engine, which was kind of a disappointment. Segway HT operates with batteries. We didn't see it straighten up and come "to life" when turned on either, but I'm pretty sure it operates that way. And we won't see a price of $2,000 or under. Looks more like $3,000 or under. And, quite frankly, we, or at least I, didn't see $100 million of R&D. That leads me to think that there's something more coming. Perhaps that Stirling! But if not then certainly mini-turbines. Batteries soon will be the 21st century version of buggy whips.
We did see a totally intuitive mechanism, extremely easy to learn and inherently stable leading to a situation where busy-body legislators and safety police won't be screaming, "Regulations, now!"
The "T" bar handle mechanism IMO appears to be part of Kamen's Segway (really meaning segue according to Kamen) to general popularity. The handle makes the device appear like other scooters. Charlie Gibson demonstrated such when he maneuvered without the "T" bar keeping his hands in his pockets. I'm confident future models will just grip the legs gently around the calf just below the knee, or perhaps just be a platform with wheels.
A very little application of imagination leads naturally to Segway dance troops, competitive sports like the equivalent of motocross or soccer or football or polo, police chases, wireless Segway wagons carting your stuff that follow you around like ducklings, tricked out Seqways for hot-rodding teenagers, an entire Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade on Segways and on and on.
They sure look like fun, don't they?
Jerry in Omaha |
