Date: Tue, 15 Jun 1999 11:52:51 +0100
From: Hash <scribble-AT-clara.net>
Subject: Cyber Geek


Any comments on following?

http://www.techreview.com
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=92s 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=92t live any other way. I have
melded technology with my person and achieved a higher state of awareness
than would otherwise be possible. I see the world as images imprinted onto
my retina by rays of light controlled by several computers, which in turn
are controlled by cameras concealed inside my glasses.

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 I=92m going to ride my bicycle,
I=92ll want to feel the cars and trucks pressing against my back, even when
they are a few hundred feet away.

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=97sparing 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=97tune 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=97who may be at home or in her office=97sees exactly
what I see and helps me pick out vegetables. She can imprint images onto my
retina while she is seeing what I see. I hope to add to the population of
similarly equipped people; last fall at the University of Toronto, I taught
what I believe to be the world=92s first course for cyborgs (see sidebar
=93School for Cyborgs=94).

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=97the
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=97a 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
=93lightspace.=94 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=97and my desire to control these
photographic instruments in new ways=97created 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 =93WearComp0.=94 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=97my 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=92t 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 =93vibravest=94=97a 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.
This way, whenever I wanted an Internet connection, these gateways would be
ready to send the data to me, no matter where I was=97even if I was in a
basement or riding on the subway.

Although I kept in touch with my family through cyberspace, my first two
years at MIT were lonely times IRL=97in 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=92 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=92s minds of =93Steve, that crazy guy running around
with a camera on his head.=94 Elliott was enthusiastic about the idea and in
1996 the Computer Society responded with an overwhelming =93yes.=94 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
=93Wearables=94 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 =93cyborg-friendly.=94 I had sensed there a cosmopolitan diversity
as well as a genuine warmth and openness that contrasted with the more
cyborg-hostile and tense atmosphere of some large U.S. cities.

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=92s latest model is being
manufactured by Sony, indicating that the Japanese electronics giant has an
interest in what some believe will become the Walkman of computing. Last
May, Xybernaut organized its own conference on wearable computing (and
invited me to give the keynote address). I may also begin to license some
embodiments of my original WearComp, as well as many of my more recent
innovations, to companies who want to manufacture commercial systems. I
think it will be especially important to make the cyborg outfit less
cumbersome=97something that=92s long been a goal of mine.

My latest version is quite sleek, and looks just like ordinary bifocal
eyeglasses, with the eyetap point hidden along the cut line. Even when
fully rigged, I can still play an acceptable game of squash.
I realize that some people see me and my invention as a potential
threat=97like the Borg of Star Trek fame: =93You will be assimilated.=94

Clearly, there are important philosophical issues to be explored. Not only
is there the danger of the technology being used to monitor people to make
them into obedient productive cyborgs, but there is also the potential that
people will become too dependent on this technology. My goal as a
responsible inventor and engineer, however, has always been to encourage
the development and manufacture of wearable computers as a means of
personal, not institutional, empowerment. That will make worthwhile all the
obstacles and challenges I have faced during my more than 20 years of
developing this technology.

I hope that if I bring WearComp to market, anyone who wishes to will
eventually be able to become a cyborg. We=92ll 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.




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