Steve Mann is publishing his view of the world - as it happens - on his home page. His medium? The Wearable Wireless Webcam, a small video camera perched on the top of a helmet. An antenna beams still images of whatever Mann happens to be looking at - directly onto his Web site. Usually, it's pretty boring stuff: Mann, 33, is a graduate student at MIT's Media Lab, so there's a good chance the picture you'll see on your computer screen will be, well, another computer screen. When he's not transmitting, you can see previously recorded images, kind of like "The Best of Steve Mann."
Don't count on scoping out any nude pix of Mann or his wife. There's no alt.binaries.erotica.steve. Mann turns off the Webcam during private moments. In fact, Mann is terribly concerned about privacy - his system was designed to highlight this concern. As Mann writes on his home page, the darker side of the information superhighway is the surveillance superhighway. Wherever we go - the supermarket or department store, the elevator or the parking garage - surveillance cameras capture our every move. Webcam is Mann's way of fighting back, his way of saying, "OK, if you're going to take pictures of me without my permission, then I'm going to take pictures of you."
Mann sometimes takes his flight into computer-mediated reality one step further.
He can put on a pair of glasses that block out light from the real world and replace it with images from his camera. Now, direct visual contact with the real world is eliminated, making Mann's life, in a real sense, a videogame. Check in at http://www white.media.mit.edu/~steve/netcam.html.
