Wearable Computing – what is new?

It has been very quiet around the subject of wearable computing the past three years.

But now, since new wireless technologies (e.g. MANET , Bluetooth offer new possible application for the field of wearable computing (e.g. Spy camera sunglasses, Running Mates , sport wrist camera and Bluetooth-iPods) it comes back into public focus.

One precursor for the area of wearable computing is Prof. Steve Mann. He and his team from the EyeTap Personal Imaging Lab at the University of Toronto are specialized in the areas of personal imaging, mediated reality and wearable computing and are working on some interesting projects. The wearable EyeTap for example is a device that can be display and camera at the same time. So, on one hand it is able to show and capture what the person sees and on the other hand the device is able to offer enhanced presentations of reality or completely occlude the natural prospect of the user by computer-generated information. It works on the basis of the Mediated Reality Toolkit. This open source tool developed by Steve Mann adds internet content to the physical reality seen through EyeTab devices.

Manipulating one’s visual perception of the environment with the help of wearable computers like EyeTab is also referred to as Computer Mediated Reality. Current European research in this area is concentrating on possible solutions to support the workers of the future. The project title is wearIT@work and the list of participating companies and research institutions is quite long.

Another initiative of Prof. Mann is the so called Glogger community where people share video clips that have their personal perspective while doing something. Those CyborgLogs are nothing new but the nowadays widespread mobile phone cameras make it as lot easier to glogg for everyone and the community grows daily. Since more and more people are as well sharing content on the Internet directly from mobile phones or PDA’s we can be sure that there will be a lot more movement in the area of wearable computing in the coming years. This fact is also causing privacy concerns like the one of Jeremy Hessing-Lewis and will probably find more devotees as the political discussion about public video surveillance increases. The next wearable computing events are the Tenth International Symposium on Wearable Computing 2006 (ISWC06) that takes place from October 11-14 in Switzerland and the 4th International Forum on Applied Wearable Computing which will be held in Israel on March 11-13, 2007.

Further links:
ETH Zürich
Center for Computing Technologies
Steve Mann