A photograph captures Steve Mann in a Clark Kent kind of moment. Mann is shown with his jacket open, pulling up his sweater and tie to reveal the sundry hardware and cables of a complete multimedia video production studio and television station, all strapped to his chest like explosives. On his face rest big, black-rimmed dark sunglasses.
In the photo, found in a publication of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, he looks like a professorial version of Robocop.
Mann, who wore the outfit to the second annual International Symposium on Wearable Computers earlier this week, has been a driving force in the wearable computing world for decades. He co-founded the MIT Media Lab's Wearable Computing Project with fellow pioneer Thad Starner, both under the advisership of MIT Professor Alex Pentland, chair of the symposium, held Monday and Tuesday in Pittsburgh.
Like others in the field, these researchers are preparing for -- and bringing about -- a future where computers are so small and light they could be worn constantly, like eyeglasses and watches are today. Already Neolithic cyborgs themselves, Mann and Starner wear their devices "all day, every day."
From a position next to Mann at a conference lunch, though he was in the same full electronics garb, the big, dark sunglasses were the only visible accoutrement. Other than that, he just looked a bit overweight.
Among Mann's prototypes is a pair of "smart underwear" used for controlling the temperature in a room. The apparatus measures the wearer's sweatiness and accordingly sends messages to Mann's heater to increase or decrease the temperature.
The 35-year-old began his foray into wearable computers well before the devices had invaded the desktop, let alone the human body. As a high school student in the 1970s, Mann was assembling helmets replete with computer circuitry, a display, and transmission capabilities. By 1991, he had brought his work in the area to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he would co-found the Wearable Computing Project and get his PhD.
Mann is now on the faculty at the University of Toronto's department of electrical and computer engineering and is one of the four original organizers of the international symposium.
On the second day of the conference, I asked him if he'd received an email message I'd sent. Mann paused in a characteristic way, as if he were perhaps reading some data from inside his smart goggles, before he explained that he hadn't. He was not quite as connected as usual, he said, since his "mast" wasn't in operation. The mast is an antenna and transceiver he installs in top-floor hotel rooms when he's on the road, keeping him on a kind of body-based wide-area network at all times.
Welcome to the future.
Wired News: Most people by now have a basic grasp on what a personal computer is and what it does. Explain the "WearComp" [wearable computer] and how it differs from the computers they know.
Steve Mann: The difference is a WearComp is something one can and does tend to use while doing other things. Computation is secondary to something else. WearComp is always ready, not just when you might think you need computation.... That way you'd never, for example, miss a baby's first steps, because you'd have all the pictures taken all the time, and it would just sense these are important pictures and save them for you.
WN: Whatever drove you to work on a wearable computer before the term "personal computer" had barely entered the lexicon?
Mann: At the time there were no personal computers. I certainly don't recall it being in the lexicon at that time, when punched cards were still being used.
My goal was to build a system for collaborative use. For example, to create an interactive process for creating pictures. I called this new form of taking pictures "dusting." Also in my mind was the notion of personal space -- a space one could call one's own -- sort of the way a building is space owned by someone. But instead I created a "building" owned, operated, and controlled by the wearer.
To the best of my knowledge, I designed and built the first WearComp. Of course, it depends how you define it.... If you define it as a programmable device -- e.g., a "computer" you can enter instructions into and execute -- then as far as I know my rig was the first such one.
WN: Your work frequently emphasizes an assortment of variations on reality -- not virtual, but "augmented," "diminished," and so forth -- always centering on the idea of "mediated reality." Take us forward a decade or so to a WearComp future. What will our reality be like when it's "mediated"?
Mann: I believe that in the next decade or so, we will see a possible end to advertising in the real world -- billboards and so on -- as we know them. I described [in my presentation] how the reality mediator inventions can be used to protect solitude, and to prevent the theft of personal attention.
These days we live in a spectacular billboard society in which our peace and even our safety (e.g., when driving a car) is threatened by a continuous proliferation of ever-more-confusing billboards. I see billboards on parking lot [gates] even, such that one has great difficulty disambiguating road signs from advertisement. This causes the "noise floor" to increase, to the extent where it is hard to navigate without a major mental effort.
The ability to filter out advertising from the real world will set forth a whole new business model. No longer will we have our personal space violated by the theft of our attention, but instead we may choose to see material of interest. What will really be the driving force behind WearComp will be mediated reality.... Just as the Sony Walkman allows us to replace Muzak with our own selection, the reality mediator will allow us to replace billboards, etc., with our own selections.
The example I showed in my presentation [on Tuesday] was a video of the system being used to replace an offensive advertisement that was located above a urinal. The advertisements above urinals are so placed that one must look directly at the ad, while this is, what many people believe to be, a private place and private activity. In particular, the glasses recognized the image of the scantily clad woman (wearing nothing but a bra, under one cup of which is stuffed a condom, with a caption containing the word "pleasure"). This image is not particularly conducive to the task at hand, and so the glasses replace it with a picture of a waterfall, which is much more conducive to the task at hand.
WN: Does WearComp cross a line of personal intimacy and privacy that some people just may find too much? How does the industry, if it becomes one, overcome this?
Mann: There are a few issues here. One is personal control. Many people are afraid of it because they think of it like other technology.... So it is easy to see how people react: fear. For example, many people were afraid of my WearCam invention as they said that they were afraid their employer would watch through their eyes to see what they were looking at, how much time they spent reading magazines, how many squares of toilet paper they pulled from the roll, etc.
In this way, it can be a vary small prison cell. However, it can also be empowering to the individual. It's all a matter of who controls the information....
This invention might change society like the phone or TV, in the sense that it could empower the individual to document corrupt practices of a government. Instead of "Big Brother" watching all of us, we might have a few of us watching Big Brother.
Like a small town: The sheriff knows what everyone's up to, but the townsfolk also know what the sheriff is up to. What we have now is like a big city where we're all lost in the crowd except for a government, or the like, who knows where everyone is. The hope is that [a wearable computer] gives us a product that we have control over.
