Seeing Might Be Wearing : Clothes, Furniture Carry Information
When they’re in their infancy, new technologies often seem implausible, even ridiculous. And so it goes with a whole new class of computer products that bear only the most passing resemblance to the PC that sits on your desk.
Soon, say researchers, who have grown accustomed to snickers, people will share information between computers mounted on their shoes, via a simple handshake. Shirts impregnated with software will work like electronic door keys, telling buildings with security systems who you are.
Or maybe tiny computers embedded in your footwear will pick up news through the carpet, then scroll the information received to your eyeglasses for reading.
To hear Neil Gershenfield, director of the Physics and Media Group of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, tell it, the day when computers are an integral part of our environment is right around the corner. He and his colleagues at MIT have been developing Things That Think--intelligent objects such as furniture and clothing that can receive instructions from a person’s movements.
Ideas for many of the objects came from research into the body’s magnetic forces, which is the basis for the data-transfer handshake. “Our research shows that computers can be less intrusive than they are today,” Gershenfield says. “If we can insert computers into clothes, they not only become easier to transport, but also easier to use. Since we’re carrying them with us everywhere, we can use them whenever we need them.”
Imagining such “wearable” computers requires a certain open-mindedness. “We have a narrow sense of the computer as a box with a screen, hard drive and processor,” Gershenfield says, “but the important issue is not what’s the definition of a computer, it’s what functions you want in your life.”
The MIT researchers are working with Nike to realize the computer-implanted footwear, though the working prototype is currently so big that it needs to be strapped to the outside of the shoes.
If the MIT research still seems a bit cosmic--and indeed the Media Lab has often been criticized for lofty ideas that don’t turn into real products--a lot of people are trying to bring similar concepts down to earth.
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University--who began working on wearable computers in 1991--are already developing their seventh generation of the gear.
“Wearable computers are at the leading edge of a new generation of computer systems that provide the right information to the right person at the right place and at the right time. They provide real-time information that extends users’ knowledge and perception of their environment,” says Asim Smailagic, an engineer and researcher at Carnegie Mellon’s Engineering Design Research Center.
The CMU researchers have developed several different machines, including VuMan 3, a system developed for vehicle inspection, and Navigator 2, designed for aircraft inspection.
VuMan 3 uses a large dial and selection button as input; a 600-element inspection checklist is presented, one item at a time, on a head-mounted display, and the user rotates the dial to highlight his or her response to fill in a blank on the inspection form.
A field trial has demonstrated that with VuMan 3, inspectors can perform their jobs in less than half the time normally required.
Navigator 2 uses speech recognition. Users make notations on a model of the aircraft of the types of defects found, and a radio transmits the inspection data to a logistics computer. Navigator 2 has proven a big time-saver too, Smailagic says, cutting the time to enter data into the logistics computer from hours to minutes.
As extraordinary as the whole idea of wearing computers sounds, in a certain sense, they’ve actually been around for years. Think about the computers that car rental attendants wear on their waists, or those used by warehouse and carwash employees.
But Thomas G. Zimmerman, a researcher in IBM’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, thinks their potential has been crippled by the lack of communications links among many different kinds of electronic devices. And he’s trying to address this problem with the Personal Area Network, or PAN.
“A mobile computer user should not have to carry a cellular phone and a cellular LAN,” Zimmerman says. “Phone numbers retrieved from a PDA [personal digital assistants], should not have to be manually typed into a cellular phone. Networking these devices would alleviate these inconveniences and allow new features.”
Zimmerman points out, for example, that a wristwatch is too small to contain a multimedia computer but that it is big enough to accommodate a microphone, a display and a camera. This kind of watch could be linked to a powerful computer located in a fanny pack or pocket. A PAN prototype allows users to swap electronic business cards by shaking hands.
“PAN devices use the salty, blood-filled body as a ‘wet wire’ to conduct modulated currents,” Zimmerman says. PAN devices could include head-mounted instruments such as headphones, hearing aids and microphones.
“Shirt-pocket devices can serve as identification badges, while a wristwatch offers a natural location for a display, microphone, camera and speaker,” he says. A waist pouch could accommodate larger, more awkward devices, such as a PDA, cellular phone or keypad. PAN medical sensors could monitor heart rate, blood pressure and respiratory rate.
Freelance writers Paolo Pontoniere and Mary Purpura can be reached at pmpurpont@aol.com
