The Olympia centre in west London is better known as the venue of the London International Horse Show, but the Wearable Technology Show, which began there on Tuesday, was so small it would have been crowded by the addition of a couple of Shetland ponies. Despite the interest in computing that you can wear, heightened by Google's publicity around its Glass headset, it's still early days for a technology sector that is forecast to boom; IHS iSuppli reckons that by 2016 we'll be buying 92.5m wearable devices.

But what will they look like? Probably not today's clunky smartwatches or smartglasses, said Sonny Vu, chief executive and founder of Misfit Ventures. "To be really wearable, an object needs to either be beautiful or invisible." Misfit's Shine tracker is almost invisible, transmitting data to the owner's iPhone. Even so, Vu is not convinced it's quite perfect.

"At the moment none of the wearable systems passes the turn-around test – as in, if you were on the way to work and realised you'd left it behind, would you turn around to get it?" Vu said he wouldn't for a fitness tracker, but he does for his smartphone or spectacles.

That doesn't mean, though, that there isn't plenty of potential interest. Virgin Atlantic is just completing a six-week trial of Google Glass, which shows details in a tiny screen above the right eye, paired with Sonysmartwatches by staff for its Upper Class passengers arriving at Heathrow, who are welcomed by name and whose passport details can be checked directly from the devices. "There are still a lot of limitations – you can't use it outside [in the rain] because it isn't ruggedised," said Kevin O'Sullivan, lead engineer of SITA Labs, which created the trial. "But passengers don't seem to mind it. Once they've asked whether it's taking pictures of them or using facial recognition, they often ask to have their picture taken wearing them."

Google Glass-alikes are proliferating. Liat Rostock, marketing director for Israel-based eyeSight Technologies, opened a case that seemed designed to ship bullion but which instead held a prototype of "smart glasses" made by Lumux. They put a virtual screen in front of your right eye, with tweets, emails and potentially extra information about the scene you're seeing overlaid on them. You control what's shown using gestures – though when she demonstrated it she did look a little like someone swatting flies.

However Vu thinks that Google Glass will mostly be used by businesses for specialist uses. "I don't think hundreds of millions of ordinary people will be wearing them next year," he said. Google though is clearly convinced: on Tuesday it announced "Android Wear", free software to power smart watches, following on from the Android software that powers a multitude of smartphones around the world. There aren't many smart watches yet that can use it - in fact, the most successful smart watch so far, the Pebble, uses its own software - but Google's presence signals the intention, and the possibility.

Virgin Atlantic hasn't decided whether to continue using Glass, but the idea of wearable technology seems inescapable as smartphones proliferate, says Ruth Thomson, campaign manager for consumer product development at Cambridge Consultants, which provides design and technology expertise to outside companies.

"If you listen to people talk here, it's all about using smartphones as hubs for wearable trackers - everybody's obsessed with smartphones," Thomson says. "It's because it's a convenient hub to send data to, and means that the cost of entry for the devices themselves is low."

But at Cambridge Consultants she is now seeing a growing number of companies which want to incorporate wearable elements. She is already working with Adidas on sports shoes that measure what you've done; sports science has enthusiastically embraced wearable systems which relay heartbeat, oxygen levels (from the colour of blood vessels) and distance to a data store.

"People are a bit hung up on the smartphone," Thomson says. "It would be more exciting if your smartwatch became the hub. You aren't going to take your smarphone on a run, or on a football pitch."

The elephant in the exhibition room, as at many technology shows, is Apple. It hasn't announced anything, but has trademarked the name "iWatch" in Europe and Japan, and had meetings in the US with the Food and Drugs Administration - driving the expectation that it will enter the wearables market too.

If it does, will that help or hinder rivals? Vu thinks it will validate the work others have been doing, but warns that "not everybody is going to wear a smartwatch". And Simon Tian of Neptune Computer, which raised $800,000 on Kickstarter to build an Android smartwatch which will make phone calls, read emails and surf the web, says: "Apple isn't a friend or foe."

Steven Holmes, general manager of chipmaker Intel's Smart Device Innovation, says: "Having Apple jump in would have a big effect. It wouldn't surprise me at all if they come out with a product – and hopefully it would solve a lot of the problems out there."

Source: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/19/wearable-technologysmartwatch-on-show