Get Ready to Talk to Your Eyeglasses
In 2020, the fashionably wired mother of three will make no ordinary trip to the grocery store.
After scanning her cupboards, she will recite a list into a microphone built into her eyeglasses. The items will be translated into text and appear on a computer screen built into the lenses. Inside the store, the woman’s identification ring will broadcast her buying habits to the store computer, which will beam back discount prices to the monitor in her eyeglasses.
Those are some of the visions of the hundreds of computer engineers who came to Pittsburgh recently for the Second International Symposium on Wearable Computers. They swapped ideas and showed off gadgets.
“This conference is mostly the geeks who are pushing like mad: ‘What can we do?’ ” said Randy Pausch of conference host Carnegie Mellon University.
But with computer advances doubling every 18 months on average, the day when computers are tiny enough to sew into everyday clothing or build into normal eyeglasses is not far off, he said.
“These guys really can do anything. It just takes time--and not much time,” he said.
From a distance, the conference resembled a gathering of jewelers. Many people wore plastic headbands holding thick cyborg-like eyepieces that displayed monitor screens. Some had keyboards in the form of clunky fingerless gloves strapped to their palms. The devices were typically connected to laptop-size processors in a bag or awkwardly hooked to a belt.
“The big, heavy, bulky stuff is all current technology that nobody actually believes will be used by any normal human being,” said Steve Feiner, associate professor of computer science at Columbia University.
Instead, mass-marketed wearable computers are expected to be much more elegant.
One hit at the conference was a pair of ordinary-looking black-rimmed eyeglasses with a built-in monitor. The translucent display was about the width of a pencil eraser and sat in the middle of one eyeglass lens. Electronic circuits in one of the glasses’ temples beam the images onto the display.
The wearer sees the image of a monitor that appears to be about 3 feet away and a quarter the size of a normal screen. But the monitor is translucent, so it does not block the wearer’s view.
The glasses are being developed by MicroOptical Corp. of Boston with the help of grants from the Department of Defense.
“The soldier needs his hands free, so the monitor needs to be unobtrusive, preferably in something the soldier carries anyway, such as eyeglasses,” said Mark Spitzer, MicroOptical’s chief executive officer. In a war, the monitor could display things like maps, targets and instructions.
The monitor will work with prescription lenses, and Spitzer said they could be available through optometrists in five years.
By next year, Spitzer hopes to distribute them for specialty fields such as medicine and industrial maintenance.
Because designers have not figured out how to fit a battery into the 3-ounce frames, they work now with a wire connected from the back of the earpiece to a portable computer.
