May/June 1999
Cyborg Seeks Community
Meet one of the creators of wearable computing and join him in his search for like-minded folks to live in an augmented reality.
By Steve Mann
People find me peculiar. They think it’s odd that I spend most of my waking
hours wearing eight or nine Internet-connected computers sewn into my
clothing and that I wear opaque wrap-around glasses day and night, inside
and outdoors. They find it odd that to sustain wireless communications
during my travels, I will climb to the hotel roof to rig my room with an
antenna and Internet connection. They wonder why I sometimes seem detached
and lost, but at other times I exhibit vast knowledge of their specialty. A
physicist once said he felt that I had the intelligence of a dozen experts
in his discipline; a few minutes later, someone else said they thought I was
mentally handicapped.
Despite the peculiar glances I draw, I wouldn
Every morning I decide how I will see the world that day. Sometimes I give
myself eyes in the back of my head. Other days I add a sixth sense, such as
the ability to feel objects at a distance. If
Things appear different to me than they do to other people. I see some items as hyperobjects that I can click on and bring to life. I can choose stroboscopic vision to freeze the motion of rotating automobile tires and see how many bolts are on the wheels of a car going over 60 miles per hour, as if it were motionless. I can block out the view of particular objects—sparing me the distraction, for example, of the vast sea of advertising around me.
I live in a videographic world, as if my entire life were a television show.
And many people assume that by living my life through the screen, I do
exactly what television leads us to do—tune out reality. In fact, WearComp
has quite the opposite effect: Visual filters help me concentrate on what is
important, heightening my sensitivity and setting my imagination free. I do
of course have occasion to remove my computational prostheses, as when I
sleep, shower or splash around in the ocean.
In addition to having the Internet and massive databases and video at my
beck and call most of the time, I am also connected to others. While I am
grocery shopping, my wife
Much of my passion has been fueled by a desire to restore some balance of privacy in a world where individuals are increasingly affronted by government surveillance and corporate encroachments. In fact, one goal of my work was to challenge the notion of totalitarian video surveillance—the now-common practice of a corporate or governmental establishment wishing to know everything about everyone in the establishment while revealing nothing about itself. Many department stores, for example, use large numbers of hidden cameras and yet prohibit customers from taking pictures.
I attempted to draw attention to this phenomenon of unreciprocated video surveillance in Shooting Back, a documentary I made during my day-to-day life in several different countries over a period of many years. Whenever I found myself in a store or some other establishment with electronic eyes perusing the premises, I asked its management why they were taking pictures of me without my permission. They would typically ask me why I was so paranoid and tell me that only criminals are afraid of cameras. Of course I was covertly recording this response using my own hidden eyetap video camera. Then I would pull an ordinary camcorder out of my satchel and give them a chance to explain their position for the record. (The camcorder was simply a prop, of course, as the eyetap camera had been capturing the scene.) The same people who claimed that only criminals were afraid of cameras had an instantly paranoid (and sometimes violent) reaction to my camcorder. Shooting Back was, I believe, the first documentary to be transmitted in real time to the World Wide Web while it was shot. (Selected portions of Shooting Back may be viewed at http://wearcam.org/shootingback.html.)
Ahead of My Time
Growing up during the 1960s and early 1970s, I always seemed to be creating things before their time. I grew up in Hamilton, Ontario—a city on the western tip of Lake Ontario about 100 kilometers from Toronto. I came by this inclination naturally; during the early 1950s, my father had built what was perhaps the first wearable radio. (He had pursued radio as a hobby since his childhood.) He had taught me quite a bit about electronic circuits by the time I started kindergarten. As a young child, I removed the head from a portable battery-powered dictating machine and replaced it with the head from a high-fidelity audio cassette deck. From this cassette transport mechanism, I built a system that enabled me to listen to music while walking around. While many people scoffed at this invention, I found it nice to be able to drown out background music while shopping, to assert my own idea of personal space, and to defend myself from theft of my solitude by the department stores with their Muzak.
In my teens I founded a concept of mediated reality, which I called “lightspace.” The goal of lightspace was to experience an altered perception of visual reality by exploring a large range of possible forms of illumination while observing a scene or object from different viewpoints. My work with lightspace led to the invention of my wearable computer. My desire to create photographic instruments that would function as true extensions of my mind and body—and my desire to control these photographic instruments in new ways—created a need for the ability to program complex sequences of events.
I began to take this matter seriously, building a digital computer from a large number of electronic components salvaged from an old telephone switching computer. I did much of this experimentation in the basement of a television repair shop where I spent much of my childhood as a volunteer, fixing TV sets. In this shop I built up a great deal of knowledge about electronic circuits.
The result of my early efforts was, in the early 1970s, a family of wearable computers I called “WearComp0.” Sometimes I took these cumbersome prototypes outside in search of spaces dark enough to explore the altered perception of visual reality I could create using portable battery-powered light sources. People would cross the street to avoid me, not knowing what to make of what must have looked to them like an alien creature. The rig was physically a burden, weighing as much or more than I did. After wearing one of these encumbrances from sundown (when it got dark enough to use them) to sunrise, my feet would be swollen, blistered and bleeding.
I continued to refine WearComp0 and its evolutionary successor, WearComp1. After much tinkering, I came up with WearComp2—my first system that truly qualified as a wearable computer in the sense that it was not just a special purpose device. WearComp2 was field programmable, with a full-function input device (a keyboard and joystick for cursor control both built into the handle of an electronic flashgun), text and graphical displays, sound recording and playback (crude, home-brew analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters), and a wireless data connection to provide links to other computers. I completed this system in 1981, before most of the world realized that computers could be portable, much less wearable.
Though an advance over my earlier prototype, WearComp2 was still a burden to lug. I wanted to reduce its bulk and make it look more normal. This goal led me in 1982 to experiment with building components directly into clothing. I learned how to make flexible circuits that could be embedded into ordinary fabric. This work enabled me to make versions of WearComp that were not only more comfortable to walk around in but also less off-putting to others.
In spite of these advances, my life as a cyborg remained mostly solitary. I did connect quite literally (by serial data cable) with an understanding woman during my freshman year at McMaster University in my hometown of Hamilton. We faced unusual challenges in this configuration, such as having to choose which public restroom to use when we were joined. Thinking back, I imagine we must have made a comical sight, trying to negotiate doorways without snagging the cable that tethered us together.
Such relationships were rare, and it was seldom that I could get others to wear my seemingly strange contraptions. Many people were unable to get past my technological shell, which they apparently found more than a little odd. Still, multimediated reality had provided me with a unique vision of the world, and by the mid-1980s I had a following of people on the fringes of society who shared (or at least appreciated) my vision. I was invited to shoot pictures for album covers and hair ads. By 1985, I began to realize that it wasn’t just the finished photographs people wanted; they also seemed to enjoy watching me take the pictures. Often I would be shooting in large warehouses, with audiences of hundreds of people. I began to realize that I had become a cyborg performance artist. By the end of the 1980s, however, I found myself yearning to return to my more substantive childhood passions for science, mathematics and electrical engineering.
While at McMaster, I added biosensors to the WearComp so that it could
monitor my heart rate (as well as the full EKG waveform) and other
physiological signals. I also invented the “vibravest”—a garment studded
with radar transceivers and vibrating elements. Wearing this vest made
objects at a distance feel as if they were pressing against my body. I could
close my eyes and walk down the hallway, confident that any wall or other
obstacle would be felt as warning vibrations on the appropriate side of the
vest. By sparing myself from the cognitive load of processing all that
visual information, I found I was able to think more clearly.
In 1991, I brought my inventions to MIT as a PhD student. As a cyborg,
uprooting myself from Canada was a formidable task, since I had installed my
cyberbody in Canada over a period of many years. Going to MIT was a sudden
move of my extended self.
First, I secretly climbed up onto the rooftops of buildings around the city
to put in place the wireless data communications infrastructure I had
brought with me from Canada. I had to quickly deploy my base stations at the
top of elevator shafts or anywhere else I could find warm dry places.
Although I kept in touch with my family through cyberspace, my first two years at MIT were lonely times IRL—in real life. I was, after all, the only person there with a wearable computer. Then in 1993, at the request of a fellow student, a local engineer named Doug Platt built a wearable system. I was no longer the only cyborg at MIT.
It took some years to get other cyborgs at MIT, thus enabling the beginnings of a sense of community. Although I never succeeded in getting a large community outfitted with my high-speed packet radio systems, the cellular telephones that began to emerge provided another answer to the problem of connectivity.
By the end of 1995, my work was attracting serious academic interest. I was asked to write an article about my work for IEEE Computer, a publication of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Computer Society. I also proposed an academic symposium on wearables and was referred to T. Michael Elliott, executive director of the Computer Society. I figured that such a conference would legitimize the field, which until then had consisted in many people’s minds of “Steve, that crazy guy running around with a camera on his head.” Elliott was enthusiastic about the idea and in 1996 the Computer Society responded with an overwhelming “yes.” This marked a turning point in my acceptance by my professional peers.
More than 700 people attended this first IEEE-sponsored symposium on
wearable computing, held in Cambridge, Mass., in October 1997. A gala
“Wearables” event the following day drew 3,000 people. In that same year I
received my doctorate from MIT in wearable computing. This was a gratifying
culmination: I had turned a childhood hobby and passion into an MIT project,
the topic of a conference, and a PhD dissertation.
This past year I returned to Canada to pursue my work at the University of
Toronto. Why Toronto? I had lived there in the mid-1980s, and the city had
seemed very
Wearing Well
Although I spent many years developing WearComp in relative isolation, I
welcome efforts to commercialize wearable computers. At the vanguard is
Xybernaut, based in Fairfax, Va. Xybernaut
I realize that some people see me and my invention as a potential
I hope that if I bring WearComp to market, anyone who wishes to will eventually be able to become a cyborg. We’ll live in a collaborative computer-mediated reality that will allow us to no longer need to distinguish between cyberspace and the real world. And then this cyborg will have lots of company.
Steve Mann is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Toronto.
Gina "Nanogirl" Miller
Nanotechnology Industries
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