The undersea WetPC

Now that they've got laptops with solar panels at Mt. Everest the bottom of the sea remained one of the few places where we couldn't play FreeCell whenever we wanted. Hopefully correcting this injustice is the WetPC, a wearable underwater computer designed by the Australian Institute of Marine Science that is making its first foray under the waves. There are two versions, one with a CPU mounted on the diver's oxygen tank and a heads-up display on the goggles, and the other with a tablet PC in a waterproof casing. The best part (besides the underwater stuff) is the interface, which is called the KordPad and is similar to other one-handed keyboards already on the market. The difference here is that what each button combination does is displayed on the screen (they call it WYSIWYP, or what you see is what you press; not the easiest of acronyms), eliminating the need to memorize complex key combinations and speeding learning time in new programs, something that is important when you only have a few minutes of oxygen left to get something done.

[Via The Red Ferret Journal]