SAN FRANCISCO -- A first-time visit to the International Symposium on Wearable Computers is likely to produce as much amusement as it does awe.
"Check out all these wacky folks with the gadgets and the goggles strapped on like high-tech bandages," you say to yourself. You smile as you suit up in a movement-sensing neoprene sport top and laugh out loud as you gaze at a Web page through a Robocop-ish head-mounted display.
At the third annual symposium, held Monday and Tuesday at San Francisco's Cathedral Hill Hotel, some of the gathered researchers were urging their cloistered colleagues to look beyond such clunky prototypes.
It's time for the budding field of wearable computing to address some practical -- and commercial -- issues. After all, four pounds of attachable processors, batteries, and interface gear aren't exactly "wearable" for everyone.
"They're starting to come alive to the fact that people don't want to look like cyborgs," said Steven Schwartz, a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab's Perceptual Computing project. "We started to think about what it's like wearing this stuff. Now we're looking at how do you make this stuff go away."
The "stuff" is a wild variety of circuit boards, power supplies, displays, and input divides that can be attached to the human body. Some designs are fairly crude, but other, more refined products are already shipping to niche markets.
The devices include everything from Schwartz's fishnet vest adorned with connected components, to laptops-in-fanny-packs, to thick glasses that reflect a video display in one lens. The glasses provide a dominant vision of the real world that is overlaid by information from an electronic world. Such information overlays are called annotated reality, a subcategory of wearable computing distantly related to virtual reality.
The basic assumption of wearable computing is that the devices will in some way enhance users' movements through the real world. As they tour a city, load boxes into a warehouse, or even attend a conference, wearable computers incorporate digital information less obtrusively than handheld PDAs or notebook computers.
Walk through the booths, sit in on a presentation, or browse through the academic papers introduced at the symposium, and you'll feel like you're at a gathering of computer hobbyists circa 1979. The event's home-grown, academic hodgepodge of information gives it a freshness sorely lacking at your average Internet or computer trade show.
Researchers at the show, which attracted an estimated 100 or so registrants on top of the 265 pre-registered attendees, tinker with hardware prototypes that fail during demos, then succeed after momentary jiggering. Corporate R&D teams are happy to have finally been freed by their company overlords to go public with their research.
"Look at what you might accomplish with a morass of headgear and cables," the inventors say eagerly to people wandering by their exhibit tables. The electronics may be clunky, the prototypes sometimes raw. But, make no mistake, just as the hobbyist's home-brewed computer was the harbinger of huge things to come, here you are wearing the future.
Project leaders like Schwartz want to anticipate that future a little more realistically by zeroing in on one of wearable's biggest obstacles: power and connectivity.
"The assumption from the get-go was that Moore's Law will make everything become so small," Schwartz said. But now it's not so clear that the ever-shrinking processor -- and ever-expanding network bandwidth -- will actually reach levels necessary to make the wearable truly viable for broader markets.
Enter what wearable researchers call "contextual awareness." Because the computers cannot depend on a constant supply of power or ever-present network connections, wearables need to be smarter about what the person is doing at any one time, and dole out resources accordingly.
The contextually aware wearable computer knows when and where its wearable components are necessary. Is the wrist-cam needed right now? If not, power down. But a wireless LAN is sensed nearby, so networking hardware is powered up. Computing tasks are simple at the moment, so off with the Pentium pack. Flip on the global positioning circuitry only when the user changes location.
"You end up with a lower-power system that's going 'Hm -- is everybody happy? ... You've scaled the machine based on contextual awareness," Schwartz said.
That kind of design will become important if wearables are to overcome the big obstacle of expensive power. "Power is expensive -- in cost, weight, and convenience," Schwartz said.
Minimize those factors, and wearables become smaller and lighter -- and more wearable -- sooner than Moore's Law might allow.
Three-time symposium attendee Phillippe Van Nedervelde noted to colleagues gathered at his Monday lunch that many of the exhibits sported technologies that hadn't dramatically advanced since the first symposium three years ago.
Having arrived in San Francisco fresh from a nanotechnology conference, he wondered whether the wait for wearables to get wearable might not one day be pre-empted by breakthroughs in another field: nanotechnology, where electronic circuits and devices are designed and built at the molecular level. A circuit could be part of our fingers, arms, and skin.
That will take care of the question of how to fit a PC in a shirt, he said, or conceal a password in a special ring or bracelet. "You want my PIN number?" he asked. "It's in my stomach."
