Even bowling is being revolutionized by Bluetooth. And I don’t mean having a Bluetooth bowling ball you can manually drive into the pins—which would rule—but instead a wireless scoring interface developed by GeTronics in cooperation with Hitachi Labs, called the “With AL” bowling front-end. I call it a front-end, but I’m not sure if that’s really the term. Here in South Carolina, we call it “the thing you use to cheat.”
Touted as being the company’s “first major version up” to bowling in 10 years, the “With AL” system is completely wireless thanks to Bluetooth; it also uses Windows XP for an OS. While the combination of these two would probably result in some heavy theft here in America, this isn’t too much of a problem in Japan. Apart from typical bowling functions, the touch panel terminal can also be used to order drinks from the bar, play minigames, and even download music and video from something called “Internet.” I’d probably just use it to change my score, but that’s because I suck at bowling.
Press Release [GeTronics]
