PITTSBURGH -- You wouldn't call them smart dressers, but their clothes are brainy. The brown-uniformed, über-efficient UPS workers are wearing computers on their sleeves.
The second International Symposium on Wearable Computers kicked off Monday, with a headlong leap into the industry's recent past: how "wearables" have already been used and tested on the job. About 30,000 UPS shipping clerks wear a device that sports a small keyboard and display, straps to the worker's forearm, and is linked to a barcode "ring scanner" that slides onto a user's finger.
Gerd Korteum, a wearable-computing researcher at the University of Oregon, demonstrated the prototype of a "collaborative wearable system."
"It's quite different from traditional collaborative systems where people just share data and knowledge," explained Korteum. "[PC users] are sharing data and knowledge contained in the computer, but they don't work in the physical world doing physical tasks. People collaborate in a virtual world which only exists inside the computer and which doesn't have any connection with the outside world."
By contrast, the wearable computer is built for action. Feed it the real world, and it will feed back useful data to make that world -- a transit system, a preflight airplane inspection, or computer-network hardware -- work better. Just strap the appropriate electronics onto a worker, and soon she's sharing her minute-by-minute experiences with the folks back at headquarters.
Handheld scanner vendor Symbol Technologies charted the intensive research and design of what it calls the first commercially successful wearable computer. Now in use by UPS -- with more customers on tap including FedEx, Office Depot, and Wal-Mart -- the product transmits barcode data to the company's network via wireless transmission.
"Technicians, maintenance people, and others with tools on their hip and helmets on their head, have to make a judgment -- to decide if [a particular problem] is in an acceptable range," said Georgia Institute of Technology researcher Jennifer Ockerman.
Jacked-in workers are able to make judgments equipped with much more information, not to mention third-party expertise beamed in from the home office, Ockerman said.
Korteum demonstrated a crude, but capable, device in which a networking expert at a desk could instruct a remote worker about equipment encountered on-site.
Through a bulky, head-mounted video camera and radio hookup that lets them speak, the man at the desktop pointed his remote colleague through the configuration of indecipherable network spaghetti.
The presentation was part of a morning of wearable case studies, designed not so much to dazzle as to demonstrate an emerging application in the here-and-now.
Carnegie Mellon researchers showed off a collaboration system used to perform detailed maintenance work on the people-mover transit system at Pittsburgh International Airport. Head-mounted, backpack-driven digital data, audio, and image exchange supplied workers with elaborate engineering drawings and other vital data on demand.
Ockerman outlined a similar system used to make airplane inspectors perform thorough, effective pre-flight procedures.
So, what's the big change?
Kortuem said the important difference in his remote wearable system and standard videoconferencing is "the camera is pointing away from wearable users showing the workplace." As a result, the cameras on either end is a kind of extension of the workers' eyes.
The Oregon team dealt with unconventional electronics and software design issues, like movement. While the technician back at the office may have been trying to point to something, the guy with the "wearcomp" might have moved.
The solution? "We froze the image to be able to point," Korteum explained. At any time, the remote worker can stop the video to highlight an object an image contains.
The same researchers also found themselves limited by image quality, which made it hard for the remote worker to identify crucial details in the head-mounted display. Since the wearable computer's connection is wireless, the resolution and video framerate are slow, and the "sight" of the remote viewer was degraded.
So the team turned to other mechanisms for feeding information encountered by the wearer. In a video demonstration, the researchers showed network devices "tagged" with small, button-like receptors, capable of providing the wearable computer with basic identifying data, such as type of device, model number, and more.
Steve Mann of the University of Toronto voiced a concern with the specialization of the wearable's commercial applications. Mann, credited by many as the inventor of the first wearable computer, built a fully functional, head-mounted computer device as a high-school student in the 1970s.
"Why not make computers that are general purpose?" Mann said of the morning session. Like the desktop computer, he believes the wearable should be whatever users need them to be. "[The wearable computer] is not a barcode reader.... It's a computer."
