‘Memory Glasses’ for the Absent-Minded Professor
When Richard W. DeVaul sits down at his computer, he sometimes forgets to eat. Names slip his mind at parties and, to his embarrassment, he mixes up the faces of people he knows well.
A string on the finger might have been a solution in the past, but the Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate student is testing a more modern lifeline for people who fumble for names, leave the stove on or forget to call Mom on her birthday.
His “memory glasses” are a tiny computer display clipped onto eyeglass frames and wired to a lightweight computer that can flash reminders to the wearer, without, he hopes, distraction or interference.
“The things that I want help with are, in a sense, very simple,” DeVaul said. “If I’ve been sitting in front of my computer for six hours and haven’t gotten up to eat, a little thing would remind me, ‘Rich, go take a break.’ ”
Chandra Narayanaswami, wearable computing group manager at IBM Corp.’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center and organizer of a recent conference where DeVaul presented his work, considers the memory glasses intriguing, if unproven.
“It’s not some intrusive mechanism like an alarm going off,” he said. “It looks like a promising idea. Of course, more testing would have to be done.”
The glasses are part of a computer system developed by MIT “Borglab” researchers tackling “wearable computing”: devices worn in clothes and engineered to solve day-to-day problems.
The computer project -- nicknamed MIThril, a reference to the light armor that Frodo Baggins wears in “The Lord of the Rings” -- is actually three separate computers wired together inside a vest.
DeVaul’s tiny head-mounted display, which juts out from the side of the eyeglass frames, is wired into a video board that he built. DeVaul, 32, hopes to program the wearable computer to cue the user with subliminal messages or images that would flash on the screen.
The computer could be programmed to remind the wearer of topics to discuss when he bumps into someone with whom he has unfinished business, remind a doctor of medical procedures at the operating table or flash a list of desired movies upon entering a video store.
DeVaul conducted a study with 28 people in which he says subliminal cueing substantially increased their ability to recall names associated with faces. His peer-reviewed findings were presented in October at the International Symposium on Wearable Computers in White Plains, N.Y.
The memory glasses are largely hypothetical at this point. The technology depends on MIThrils becoming practical to wear outside the lab.
Daniel L. Schacter, chairman of Harvard’s psychology department and author of “The Seven Sins of Memory,” said he’s intrigued by the idea of the memory glasses. But he said he knows of no scientific evidence showing that subliminal cueing works.
Schacter is right to be skeptical, DeVaul said. But DeVaul is nonetheless confident in his research and notes that subliminal cueing differs from subliminal advertising, which exhorts viewers to do something they would not ordinarily do. Cueing only works as a reminder of something already known, he said.
Although the memory glasses are still only in lab tests, DeVaul has set up a company, AWare, to begin commercializing the technology. He estimates that adding the clip-on monitor and software would eventually add no more than $50 or $100 to the cost of a digital assistant.
The biggest test may have nothing to do with the technology. On a pre-Sept. 11 trip, DeVaul wore MIThril when he flew to a conference. Someone who saw DeVaul wearing the head display called police, who summoned a SWAT team. He jokes about the incident -- and predicts that people eventually will come to accept such video technology as they have cell-phone headsets.
