SEATTLE -- For the cyborgs that stalked the University of Washington campus last week, "always on" doesn't mean a broadband Internet connection.
The MIT and Georgia Tech grad students attending the Sixth Annual International Wearable Computer Symposium were out to test the advantages and limits of having their computers literally at their fingertips.
Shrinking components and power requirements let people walk around with the equivalent of a desktop system strapped to their waist or sewn into a vest. Advanced optical displays let users see displays and the world around them at the same time without looking like a character from Robocop.
Georgia Institute of Technology professor Thad Starner believes that once people get used to the idea of having a computer with them all the time they'll find them far more useful than PDAs and laptops. The wearable computer pioneer is also chief technology officer at Charmed Technologies, one of the first companies to try to move wearable computers out of the research lab and into common usage.
"With a wearable computer I can do everything a laptop can do, and in any position," he said.
Starner claims PDAs and other portables simply take too much time to get out and turn on in most situations.
He calls it "the two-second rule," which states that if a device takes more than about two seconds to start up, it will get used significantly less. After about 15 seconds of wait-time, he said, "you've already gone for coffee." In surveys of businesspeople and academics Starner has taken during speaking engagements, about half the people who have PDAs admit to having stopped using them on a regular basis.
One of the newest applications for wearable computers that appeared at this year's conference is augmented reality (AR) -- a way to combine data and graphic displays with what a person is looking at by filtering that view through a see-through eyepiece. The technology has been tested as a promising enhancement for interactive tours of museums and archeological sites.
Unlike the prerecorded audio tours in use now, these devices customize the tour to fit the user's profile and track their location with magnetic and GPS sensors. They can serve up printed or audio information, visual representations of what the ruins looked like in their heyday and even animated displays of people engaged in the typical activities of the day, based on the latest archeological findings.
Medical applications for AR, like one using Microvision's "Nomad," are still in development. But the advantages -- such as having surgeons wear head-mounted displays showing CT scans and X-rays without having to look away from the patient -- are obvious.
Toshihiko Oba, a head and neck surgeon at Tokyo's Saisekai General Hospital, said one problem with the devices demonstrated at the conference was their lack of depth perception. Another issue developers are working on is providing the fine-movement tracking needed to keep the virtual image lined up with what's actually happening.
Another promising area for AR is bringing computer and real-world gaming together.
Professor Bernt Schiele and graduate student Stavros Antifakos from the Perceptual Computing and Computer Vision Group at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, have invented the game Unmasking Mister X, where players with a sensing device have to find Mister X by checking if the sensor values match the physical environment and the behavior of another player.
Schiele and Antifakos seem to be on to something: As engineers and entrepreneurs lined up to show their latest inventions at the annual gadget show, one question arose at almost every turn: "Can you play Quake on it?"
