Wearing Your Computer On Your Sleeve

October 14, 2007

This past Friday, I spent a blustery and rainy fall afternoon at the IEEE’s International Symposium on Wearable Computers. It was held in Boston at the Hyatt Harborside, which I wouldn’t even mention, but the view of the harbor—steel gray water dolloped in white caps—and city skyline was freakin’ amazing. You couldn’t help noticing the view from the demonstration room, where many of the attendees had set up tables to show off their electronics.

I made a bee line for the folks from Georgia Tech cuz I recently did a news story about their Gesture Watch. Sure enough, grad student Jungsoo Kim was there wearing the watch and showed me in person how it worked. His colleagues were there as well, including Travis Deyle, who was showing off his Hambone bio-acoustic gesture device and PhD student Tracy Westeyn, who has what looks like a cute little stuffed dog, but is actually a child’s toy designed to monitor developmental progress.

I really liked Leah Buechley’s electronic textile kit, called LilyPad Arduino, which contains swatches of fabric that have built-in circuits or sensors. The pieces can be sewn into cloth and connected and powered with conductive thread. Leah, a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder, was wearing a top made with the components. When she moved her arm, an LED on her chest changed color.

There is a whole lot of work going on in the area of conductive fibers right now. If you’re going to wear them in clothing, you have to make them durable and washable. A couple of the demonstrations were on that topic alone.

And don’t worry about getting zapped, said Buechley “because the amount of power that is running through the wearable is really low.  “My kit is powered with a single AAA battery.  Just like you can't get shocked by touching both ends of a AAA battery, you can't get shocked by any LilyPad construction,” said Buechley.

While browsing the demonstration tables, I couldn’t help but notice the prevalence of head-mounted displays. Ok, maybe “prevalence” is too strong. Only three guys were wearing them. But these devices are SO conspicuous that seeing just one creates an indelible impression. It got me wondering why, with all of the shrinkage going on in computer technology, these devices are still so bulky. It seems like somebody could make them smaller and less noticeable. But then, maybe bulky is good, ya know, sort of geeky cool. After all, people already walk around with those chunky Bluetooth headsets that make it seem as if an electronic crustacean has latched onto the ear.

What do you think? Should head-mounted displays be seen or unseen?

The afternoon ended with a gadget show, in which attendees had one minute to demonstrate devices they had created, bought, or modified. My favorite was the brain sensor in an Altoids can, but there were some other devices like a barely visible camera mounted in a pair of eyeglasses that did face expression recognition and another gadget allowed for touchless control of an iPod. Just wave your hand to fast forward, select or play.

I left in the rain wishing that I could just wave my hand to fast forward my taxi through Red Sox playoff traffic.

Comments

[Leather Soul]

Oh my geek!

[kim]

what kind of sense did that make? loved that message

[Kim]

this is a great article in Ms. Magazine that talks about a woman who invented a GPS system and computer device for prostitutes -- it's called the Aphrodite Project. If the woman feels threatend she can set the computer device in her shoes to sound an alarm and a message will be sent out to local police or to a support group that watches out for their safety. Amazing.

[Someone]

Just make sure not to wear any of this to the airport!

[Mysterymeat]

This is getting us pretty close to Jean Luc Picard as "Locutus of the Borg", is it not? See here: http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Image:LocutusOfBorg2367.jpg