Publication: The Daily Telegraph Date: October 21, 1997 Author: Wendy M. Grossman Title: Ready to wear This season the fashion-conscious geek is wearing a sturdy Levi’s denim jacket in a fetching shade of off-black with a pale grey keypad embroidered on the front of the left shoulder. At least, that’s the hot trend at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, where last week researchers met to consider wearable computers. The keyboards actually work: poke the geek and music plays. Researcher Rahmi Post said the key is conductive thread (kevlar mixed with stainless steel), which, once embroidered using a standard industrial process, is hooked to a chip wired to a small MIDI synthesiser on the other shoulder. So it was that an embroidered barbershop quintet performed a drum-laden ensemble piece in front of host Leonard Nimoy and 1,000 of the Lab’s sponsors. Other readily available conductive fabrics include gleaming Indian organza, some of which is made with silk wrapped in copper foil. Ginger snaps can both connect components and hold on subsystems, which can then be easily removed for washing. If you follow the chronology put forward by the Media Lab’s Professor Michael Hawley, I have spent most of my life since I was 11 decked out in two wearable computers: my eyeglasses, and a wristwatch. I never thought of them as computers, but the first offers what is now called “augmented reality” (in my case, a world that isn’t fuzzy) and the second offers me external, constantly available assistance. They are thus the protozoan ancestors of tomorrow’s wearables. MIT’s Media Lab is famous for coming up with weird ideas about the future of technology. Twelve years ago, when it was founded, the Media Lab talked of sensory deprivation and the need to build machines that could communicate with humans using the methods we are good at by nature -- speech, moving pictures, touch. Researchers at the lab worked on projects to develop motion-activated sensors, electronic hyperinstruments, facial recognition, imaging, and 3D holography. Two years ago, the lab changed direction and started talking about Things That Think. Computers, argued the lab’s founder and director, Nicholas Negroponte, should not be self-contained machines on our desks, they should be invisibly embedded into our environment, so that we live in not just a smart house but a smart world. Trains shouldn’t be stupid enough to crash, your shoes should tell your house you’re coming up the path, and your doorknob should recognise your touch. Cynics commented at the time that a great benefit of the new initiative was that it gave the Lab a green field belt of virgin sponsors to sign up: Nike, Steelcase (furniture), Levi-Strauss, and Swatch, besides the existing suspects like IBM, Microsoft, and British Telecom. But the seeds had already been planted. In the early 1990s two Lab researchers, Steve Mann and Thad Starner, began wandering around MIT weirdly encased in headsets, laptop computers, and one-handed keyboards known as Twiddlers. Their personal goals were not the same: Mann wanted a constantly present photographer’s assistant, while Starner says he just wanted “a better brain.” Accordingly, Mann wears a constantly running camera, while Starner takes notes on everything and everyone he sees or meets. Many guys like them showed up for the wearables conference: back-mounted laptops, strap-supported laptops, head-mounted displays, special glasses, belt- or shoulder-mounted battery packs, homemade one-handed chord keyboards. Wearables guys have this in common: they don’t mind toting a good ship Enterprise full of hacked-together stuff if it’s functional. In fact, Star Trek isn’t a bad model for this. Although everyone agrees that wires, omnipresent in Star Trek, have to go, there are many places where the show, like other science fiction, predicted the shape of things now being invented. At a wearables conference, it’s not enough to watch and take notes; ultimately, you have to sample being a wearables guy; laptop bags and Pen Pilots don’t count. Accordingly, I tried on the MARSS system developed by McDonnell-Douglas to assist US Army personnel in weapons maintenance work. The battery pack in the back of the tough camouflage vest more or less balanced the 12lb Pentium computer in the front. With it, you use a mouse pad, velcroed to one shoulder, and wear a heads-up display which places the instructions at your upper left so they don’t obstruct your vision but are readily available when you need them. Basically, it feels like wearing a heavy sandwich board. The future is obvious: everyone wants smaller, lighter, and more comfortable. As Dick Urban, from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency summarised the trade-offs, a soldier can carry four days’ battery power at the expense of 402 rounds of ammunition, 4 days’ worth of food, or a protective mask and First Aid kit. Which would you jettison for a computer? At Boeing, a team is experimenting with an augmented reality system to guide workers through creating wire harnesses for new airplanes. In the old method, workers wind wires around pegs on a single-purpose board. The new method uses a heads-up display to show workers where to place movable pegs on a standard board so that any harness can be built on any board. The savings in storage -- there are 1,000 bundles in a 747 -- are substantial, and trials showed that bundles built this way passed the same quality assurance tests as those built the traditional way. But as usual, the humans make trouble. “People from my plant don’t want to wear a funny hat all day long,” said David Mizell, who masterminded the project. “The first batch of head mounts gave you a terminal case of hat hair, and made you look like a geek.” The same design problem applies to other such systems, including one created at Georgia Tech to help chicken inspectors report test results without having to use their poultry-covered fingers, and those developed at the Media Lab to teach beginners to play pool and baseball. The latter two are fun; the pool system draws lines in a heads-up display showing the angle to use to hit successful shots, while the baseball system analyses the data from attached sensors and voices instructions on improving your swing. It kept wanting me to step forward. Some of the improvements needed are beginning to appear. The near-by start-up MicroOptical, for example, has designed a display that looks like an ordinary pair of glasses; the display itself is actually a small cube in the middle of one lens, run by a small box of electronics along one earpiece. Starner and Mann both wear these now, and there is no doubt that this design is much more acceptable. The Media Lab is tackling the battery problem by recovering energy from the wearer’s movements. Other projects are developing computers that respond to emotions and learning to digitise colours so they can be represented by sound or touch pads (useful for both blind people and for displaying parts of the spectrum humans can’t see). The US Army impressively showed off a T-shirt, made of cotton woven with fibre optics, that can relay medical data from injured soldiers. This is one example of why medicine is expected to be the first and biggest application for wearables. The T-shirt has a future, unlike most of the gadgets surrounding me last week. One likely future seemed to me to be DEC researcher Bob Mayo’s proposed “Factoid,” a tiny circuit board with three chips and a miniature antenna which he hopes will gather data at your discretion and send it, encrypted, to your home computer via any suitably equipped PC it happens to pass. I don’t know what it would be good for, but it would sure be easy to carry around.### --- Copyright (c) Wendy M. Grossman, 1997. This is the article as submitted to the Telegraph, before editing and copy-editing. Its original URL was: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?xml=/connected/1997/10/21/ecwear21.xml.