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Factomatic writes "With the supply of IP addresses expected to run out by 2005 due to the popularity explosion of the Internet and the expectation that everything from your phone to your washing machine will soon have its own IP address, Alex Lightman, CEO of Charmed Technology and chairman of last month's North American IPv6 Global Summit tells the New York Times "we're going to need something like 100 IP addresses for each human being." IPv6 will increase the supply of addresses from 4 billion today to a number in excess of 35 trillion that is "so big that there's not a word for the number," says Cody Christman, director of product engineering for Verio, which offers IPv6 in San Francisco, Washington and elsewhere. The article is a good layman's backgrounder on the looming IP crisis."

Factomatic writes "With the supply of IP addresses expected to run out by 2005 due to the popularity explosion of the Internet and the expectation that everything from your phone to your washing machine will soon have its own IP address, Alex Lightman, CEO of Charmed Technology and chairman of last month's North American IPv6 Global Summit tells the New York Times "we're going to need something like 100 IP addresses for each human being." IPv6 will increase the supply of addresses from 4 billion today to a number in excess of 35 trillion that is "so big that there's not a word for the number," says Cody Christman, director of product engineering for Verio, which offers IPv6 in San Francisco, Washington and elsewhere. The article is a good layman's backgrounder on the looming IP crisis."

isdale writes: "Charmed Technology, founded by MIT Media Lab graduates, announced what it claims is the fastest available wearable computer -- 800Mhz Crusoe TM5800 processor. The CharmedIT comes standard with a 266 Mhz Pentium MMX for about $2k. The Crusoe upgrade costs another $500. The OS is extra ($250 for RedHat or Debian), as is the display, input device, carrying case, battery, charger, usable application ... if that isn't enough options, you can also get a DIY kit."

isdale writes: "Charmed Technology, founded by MIT Media Lab graduates, announced what it claims is the fastest available wearable computer -- 800Mhz Crusoe TM5800 processor. The CharmedIT comes standard with a 266 Mhz Pentium MMX for about $2k. The Crusoe upgrade costs another $500. The OS is extra ($250 for RedHat or Debian), as is the display, input device, carrying case, battery, charger, usable application ... if that isn't enough options, you can also get a DIY kit."

amyaimee writes: "Perfect for you hygiene-challenged computer geeks (you know who you are): New Scientist reports on a new clothing made of milkweed containing a special strain of e. coli designed to feed on human sweat and the proteins that cause B.O. Alex Lightman of Charmed Technology quips, "I wear the same pair of jeans all the time and I'm sure they have bacterial colonies living in them, but if they were selected to convert my sweat into sweet-smelling pheromones, that would be great," he says."

In Take 1 of this two-part series, I described some of the current technology in wearable computing as seen at ISWC 2000, this year's just-finished iteration of the International Symposium on Wearable Computers, from head-mounted displays to intelligent jackets. In this round, a little more speculation about where the future of wearability lies, with a peek in the door at some of the things being done in top university labs. What forces will shape the future of wearable computing? Hint: GeForce 2's are still hard to carry, and there's never enough power.

In square circle, with realtime 3-D overlay Professor Steve Feiner heads a Columbia University / Naval Research Laboratories joint project called Battlefield Augmented Reality System (BARS), one of the more graphically ambitious projects on view at ISWC 2000. He and graduate students Drexel Hallaway and Tobias Hoellerer demonstrated how, using transparent overlays representing maps and other data entered offline, allows the user to interact with others in 3-D environments, and to view information intelligently superimposed on real-world objects as they walk around. On the second day of the conference, the team was demonstrating maps they had entered over the course of the first day using the show-floor itself. One caveat: instead of a tiny metal box tucked discreetly out of sight, these systems approach the limit of wearability while in their design phase. The two systems on display, built separately, resemble backpacking rucksacks stripped of their bags to reveal a Rube Goldberg symphony of batteries, cables, video cards, and nondescript boxes which turn out to be GPS revievers and dead-reckoning devices.

"Because for what we're using, there's nothing you can buy off the shelf, or build really easily, that would be lightweight, low-power consuming and capable of doing the sthings that we want to do. But because we want to be able to go outside do some of the things that we want to do, we put these backpacks on. ... So we're building things that are bigger than they would have to be if they were built by a real oomputer company. It's mostly the fact that we need less the processor power -- because, as you know, the processing power of a high-end end laptop is damned close to the processng power of a high-end desktop -- the important thing to us is that the graphics card is a real desktop [card], basically the fastest PCI card you can get right now."

All that video power is still not enough for the taste of Feiner or his grad students, but it does present a dazzling display of rapidly-updated, colorful information on the monitors scattered around their exhibit. It looks like a video game, until you relaize that it's done in real-time.

In keeping with it's military funding and applications, these semi-wearables use centimeter-accurate GPS receivers ("Which is a waffling way of saying they can be accurate to within a couple of centimeters," says Feiner, "given that you have good satellite tracking performance."), and "in a lot of our current systems, the computer weighs less than the GPS." When GPS coverage is spotty or non-existent, the system uses its included dead-reckoning device to augment the GPS measurements.

"We like to call these bearables, rather than wearables," he grins. "This whole system weighs something like 20-odd pounds. Compared to a camping backpack, that may be pretty good, but for doing real everyday work? It's totally unacceptable."

"What are it's applicatons? At this size, and this level of kludginess? Research. The question is, what happens when it becomes small enough and rugged enough -- truly, they run sort of hand-in-hand -- to be truly wearable? And by truly wearable, I think less of Lizzy and it's predecessors, something that's bigger than my camera for example -- and more in terms of somethng like this --" he indicates the clamshell cell phone on his belt --"and this is even pushing it in terms of size. That's going to happen, in my prediction, sometime by the end of the decade. that prediction is based on technological feasibility and a lot of it is people, companies, whether they get it or not."

See Spot run! See spot compile the Linux kernel! Carnegie Mellon has a long history of wearables research, going back to the Vu-man series of computers in 1991. The current forefront of research at CMU is represented by Spot, a StrongArm-based research wearable in initial fabrication right now. "We'll get metal in November, and that means I'll be able to do the kernel bring-up around New Year's. Essentially, once you have an electronic layout, when you essentially just say what components are connected to what, with wires, there's an issue of trying to cram it into a box this big." That according to Spot's originator and designer, CMU doctoral student John Dorsey. Dorsey is also the ARM Linux kernel hacker for the board that Spot is based on. "This big," in this case, means a tiny card with the footprint of a PCMCIA card, itself enclosed in a 6"x3"x1" oblong pod, designed to snuggle in any of several spots on the human body. That tiny box holds up to 256MB of SDRAM, as well as up to 64MB of Flash RAM, and a CompactFlash slot. "And that's pretty incredible considering the amount of stuff that's actually on the board, so we hired an outside firm to design that for us, who will lay things out so they will fit in that area."

Spot is not destined to hit The Sharper Image anytime soon, though. "I guess our immediate deisre is to make it available to other resarch labs and universities," says Dorsey. "It's a little bit feature filled for it to be [the basis of] a cheap commercial product at this point."

What about the research that went into Spot -- will you be able to raise your own? I asked Dorsey about the possibility of the plans for Spot being put on the Web for public consumption, and his answer was uncertain, but optimistic. "There's an issue of [rights] when an outside funding agency gives the money to design something like that, they have first dibs on the intellectual property. There's a trend that I see at this conference, probably the most exciting thing I've seen, which is that a lot of companies are trying to make their designs available on the web, and that's the kind of thing I would like to see happen. At least for people who are in the research community, there's no reason not to do that. It's cewrtainly saves horrendous duplication of effort, and really helps us to make progress. The important thing is that you just want to get the platform done, and out there."

Thanks to the GPL, though, Dorsey says it's not as important whether Spot's schematics are available, becauses the clue that a home-builder would need will be in public view: "There's a really strange dichotomy when it comes to what people will permit for software, and what they will permit for software. People don't even blink when I say I want to GPL stuff that I write for research, my thesis or whatever -- but for hardware I think there's just a different mindset. What Ithink is funny when it comes to hardware is that I'm allowed to GPL the kernel port for this board. And any reasonably intelligent person could look at the code for the various drivers and support, and sort of back out what's actually in the box. So it's a little bit silly to say you can't say what the schematic looks like."

Like most of the academic reasearchers in Atlanta, CMU uses Linux heavily in its wearables development. Dorsey does have a short wishlist for future developments in the Linux kernel, though: "Power management, that's the big one. I know that the WRL folks over at Compaq are working on that noe for the SA-11 family [the processor which runs Spot] in particular. I would like to see it show up more often in networking research applications. BSD really does own the game as far as that goes right now, and I need to do all my thesis stuff on Linux, so I'd like to see that happen."

Also with CMU and living proof that it takes more than kernel hackers to build computers onto the human body, Francine Gemperle has a background in industrial design, and now is a graduate student with the CMU Design Studio. Gemperle was hired when she finished her undergraduate degree a few years ago, to help make small computers truly comfortable to the users. Now the only designer working with the group, Gemperle has been working since last February on the conference's organization. "They actually thrust the job of exhibits on me, and it's been fun, I've enjoyed coordinating it."

She's coordinated a group of about 25 volunteers who helped put this conference together, and has spent the last year arranging sponsorships, speakers and exhibitors. "Getting people involved in this conference is a tricky thing, because there are a lot of people who are doing resarch in wearables [not in attendance], but having it cleared through their lawyers and PR departments is another story. So there are many big companies that we know of that are actively pursuing wearables, but who aren't here. I think there were some people here from Motorola beofer, and everybody knows that IBM is pursuing wearables, but they don't really show up here." (IBM was demonstrating their Linux-equipped wristwatches, in fact, but did not exhibit any results of their wearable Thinkpad project.)

Charmed, I'm sure Brad Singletary, a PhD candidate at Georgia Tech, was one of the several poster exhibitors, explaining to passers by his current research project, which is one likely to have an impact on other wearable endeavors as well. Singletary is building a database of faces (which now includes a mugshot of me), recorded with a pair of helmet-mounted video cameras (one color, one black and white) onto a pair of DV decks worn in his clothing, to be used later as the basis of a recognition program.

Pointing to small white "X"s on the visor of his Glasstron display, Singletary says "I can line these X's up with your eyes, and then I push a button which records audio along with the video track, to tell me where your face is in the video stream. I push the button and then it just starts firing automatically."

He's trying to create a simple recognition algorithm rather than the unweildy multi-point ones currently in use. "It's differnet from the traditional face recognition; that's what the military wants, they want full 3-D recognition. I also want to help people with prosophagnosia - face blindness ... I'd like to help those people, give them some way to recognize people."

In addition to that disparate pair of users, he says, "Another is police, regular police ... infrared will allow them to function in the dark. But there are also more prosaic uses: " A typical businessman who walks into a conference, he wants to know 'Who do I know?' Who they are, and if he's met them before."

Of the odd-looking yellow piece on the back of his helmet, Thompson sheepishly admits "The dumbell is for balance. I built this thing as quickly as possible."

Singeltary's graduate advisor, Thad Starner, along with fellow graduate student Daniel Ashbrook and long-time wearables enthusiast and hobbiest (and Vassar College employee) Greg Priest-Dorman, are now not only academics, but entrepreneurs. All are part of Tharner's brainchild, Charmed Technology. Charmed's approach to wearable computers is different from that of well-known commerical producers VIA and Xybernaut: rather than invest in ultra-miniaturized cases and custom motherboard designs, they decided to go with commodity PC-104 boards, contained in a case which gains in affordability what it compromises in size. Designed by Priest-Dorman, the case features a slight bend for greter body conformance, and is designed to be worn either in a vest or carried in a hip-hugging bag.

Perhaps most exciting is that in addition to their plans to start shipping in November kit-based systems based on these designs for about $2,000 (a pittance in the wearables market), they're also making the plans available to anyone who cares to download them. "So we have these plans, and they're actually on the Web site, you can download them and build them yourself, you can take them to a metal shop and have them build it," says Ashbrook. "It's totally open source."

One polyfleece vest to bind them all! One of the few places with a strong claim as the birthplace of wearable computing, MIT remains perhaps the most famous breeding ground. While Charmed makes low-cost and easy assembly a priority,resulting in a slightly larger box, a project spearheaded by graduate student DeVaul called Mithril, out of MIT's Media Lab, takes a completely different tack, pushing the components of its wearable system into near invisibility. While nanotechnology hasn't yet advanced to the point where processor, memory and battery can simply be miniaturized and placed in the wearer's navel, the Borg Lab researchers (yes, they really call it the Borg Lab) are convinced that until wearable computers are nearly forgettable, they'll never catch on. To gain the benefits of ubiquitious computing, in other words, the annoyance can't outweigh the rewards.

I got the scoop on Mithril first from Media Lab Research Scientist Steven Schwartz, who started by showing me the "Smart Vest" of an earlier project. "It comes out the Human Design Group, which used to be called Vision and Modelling. It's professor Sandy Pentland's group, and it's the group where wearables first started at the MIT Media Lab.

"The system started off as PC-104 configuration. And that resulted in system that were medium sized boxes with stacked PC-104 architecture, mostly X86 machines, and primarily running Linux. These machines were used with a variety of sensors, including cameras. But as the wearables project has evolved, we've seen a couple of different needs. Power is one -- power is the real battlefield. Batteries are expensive, they're burdensome, they're heavy. In a big pciture sense, batteries are expensive, right? Not just cost, the whole inconvenience. So we're working on a low-power platofrm. And in order to conduct our own research, we wanted it to look a little more "everyday" like. We wanted to be able to dress and act as we normally dress and act, so that the wearable computers we're using to research were actually integrated with our lives and non-interfering with the actions that we take as mobile individuals."

"For instance, we didn't want the computer to interfere by covering our eyes, or requiring too much unser interaction, or simply be buly or odd-lookingm because because you want to go out and see where wearable computing can help you in your conversatons with people, you certainly don't want that kind of distraction. So we started working on a clothing computer, essentially -- but with one variant. We didn't want people to have to buy a specific outfit, or let's say have to throw out the old outfit because they've upgraded their computer. So we dicided to make a lining, essentially a detatchable, soft chassis. And because we didn't want it to be uncomfortable, we got rid of the boxes, the hard packaging. So we went to soft packaging, distributed the electronics in a sort of very wide area over the upper body, went to very small modules, and started to implement some of the very low power RISC architectures. StrongArm, PowerPC."

"We started building these, and engineering them to work with MicroOptical's displays, so you could have very small clip-on displays that don't cover much of your vision, yet provide lots of rich information. WHen we think of rich content for wearables, we don't thnk of walking down the street oozing through a UXGA screen, because with tat kind of content you'd probably trip right down the street. Cyborgs don't like this. So the idea is that the type of informatino that you want as a wearable user is stuff that's compatibile with high mobility, and high levels of interaction, unexpected physical events taking place."

"So we built the system called Mithril -- it's a new platform that all the research will be done on. It started over a year ago, when we did the smart vest project," Schwartz says as he steps into a vest from that project. "PowerPC, WaveLan, Linux, Apache. Samba as a remote server. We did it to show that we could put a high performance machine intoo clothing that could be worn summer or winter by a man or a woman. ... my advice to people is that the ultimate geek is chic. When you can hide all that big artillery, heavy metal that we carry around -- the ultimate wearable computer is being able to blend in with the people down the street. To walk down the most expensive block in New York, to see the most incredible radio on display, try it out, hold it, feel it, decide I want to buy it -- and on my eyeglasses is flashes where I can get it on the Internet for the best price."

DeVaul and fellow graduate student Josh Weaver explained their computer-in-vest concept. Each wore a custom-made vest outfitted with special pockets, some visible, some hidden. (That by the way, is the entire world's supply of Mithril systems right now."We'll go home on separate planes," DeVaul joked.) Displaying the the 200Mhz StrongArm processor in one pocket (part of the central core, called Brightstar), then the IBM microdrive and reader in another, DeVaul asks "You want to know how much this draws? Around 4 watts, for the whole system." In another pocket, two smallish batteries (like most projects on the floor, the MIT group swears by lithium-ion camcorder batteries, which in the words of one builder "have the energy density of a hand grenade"). But those are not the only components. Wireless networking lives in yet another pocket, and a small board with three IR LEDs (and one green one, so the wearer can know it's functioning) is worn like a campaign button. Those IR LEDs are used to uniquely identify people or objects, to aid the computer system in knowing where it is, or "remembering" the identity of a similarly equipped person you encounter.

The whole system is tied together with a home-brewed cabling system, part of DeVaul calls the "Mithril Body Network," which integrates power and data delivery (USB and I2C) over a flat braided cable designed to wrap smoothly around the wearer. DeVaul invited me to try on his vest, and it really does feel natural.

"Feeling Natural" in fact, is one big element of the design of Mithril. "One way to think about what [wearable computers] can do is to think of them as personal assistants -- helping you remember information or accomplishs tasks in everyday life," says DeVaul. Context-awareness and scaleability are the driving forces behind his designs, and from the looks of it, building a computer that can not only communicate well with the devices beyond its immediate reach, but do so while remaining unobtrusive is a heroic task. "You only want the computer to give a response, say, if it's appropriate for it to do so at the time. If you're asking me a question, you don't want the computer to answer you instead."

And though perhaps a tricker project to assemble the parts and skills to complete, than Charmed's PC-104 kit, DeVaul promises that anyone with the desire will be able to build a Mithril system. "I believe in Open Source software -- continuing the tradition of Thad Starner, everything, including the PCB designs, will end up on a web site."

When will the future arrive? Never soon enough, maybe, but the future does have a way of creeping up on us. The conventional wisdom at ISWC 2000 is that honest-to-goodness wearable computing affordable to all and with many of the current bugs shaken out, is about 10 years away. One person familiar with MicroOptical's displays said that their plans call for a drastic reducton in price over the next two years, to perhaps as low as one or two hundred dollars. Processor power, meanwhile, marches on. When a 600MHz Transmeta chip is old hat, it will still be enough to run the same applications it does today. I'm looking forward to joining the cyborgs when that day arrives.

In Take 1 of this two-part series, I described some of the current technology in wearable computing as seen at ISWC 2000, this year's just-finished iteration of the International Symposium on Wearable Computers, from head-mounted displays to intelligent jackets. In this round, a little more speculation about where the future of wearability lies, with a peek in the door at some of the things being done in top university labs. What forces will shape the future of wearable computing? Hint: GeForce 2's are still hard to carry, and there's never enough power.

In square circle, with realtime 3-D overlay Professor Steve Feiner heads a Columbia University / Naval Research Laboratories joint project called Battlefield Augmented Reality System (BARS), one of the more graphically ambitious projects on view at ISWC 2000. He and graduate students Drexel Hallaway and Tobias Hoellerer demonstrated how, using transparent overlays representing maps and other data entered offline, allows the user to interact with others in 3-D environments, and to view information intelligently superimposed on real-world objects as they walk around. On the second day of the conference, the team was demonstrating maps they had entered over the course of the first day using the show-floor itself. One caveat: instead of a tiny metal box tucked discreetly out of sight, these systems approach the limit of wearability while in their design phase. The two systems on display, built separately, resemble backpacking rucksacks stripped of their bags to reveal a Rube Goldberg symphony of batteries, cables, video cards, and nondescript boxes which turn out to be GPS revievers and dead-reckoning devices.

"Because for what we're using, there's nothing you can buy off the shelf, or build really easily, that would be lightweight, low-power consuming and capable of doing the sthings that we want to do. But because we want to be able to go outside do some of the things that we want to do, we put these backpacks on. ... So we're building things that are bigger than they would have to be if they were built by a real oomputer company. It's mostly the fact that we need less the processor power -- because, as you know, the processing power of a high-end end laptop is damned close to the processng power of a high-end desktop -- the important thing to us is that the graphics card is a real desktop [card], basically the fastest PCI card you can get right now."

All that video power is still not enough for the taste of Feiner or his grad students, but it does present a dazzling display of rapidly-updated, colorful information on the monitors scattered around their exhibit. It looks like a video game, until you relaize that it's done in real-time.

In keeping with it's military funding and applications, these semi-wearables use centimeter-accurate GPS receivers ("Which is a waffling way of saying they can be accurate to within a couple of centimeters," says Feiner, "given that you have good satellite tracking performance."), and "in a lot of our current systems, the computer weighs less than the GPS." When GPS coverage is spotty or non-existent, the system uses its included dead-reckoning device to augment the GPS measurements.

"We like to call these bearables, rather than wearables," he grins. "This whole system weighs something like 20-odd pounds. Compared to a camping backpack, that may be pretty good, but for doing real everyday work? It's totally unacceptable."

"What are it's applicatons? At this size, and this level of kludginess? Research. The question is, what happens when it becomes small enough and rugged enough -- truly, they run sort of hand-in-hand -- to be truly wearable? And by truly wearable, I think less of Lizzy and it's predecessors, something that's bigger than my camera for example -- and more in terms of somethng like this --" he indicates the clamshell cell phone on his belt --"and this is even pushing it in terms of size. That's going to happen, in my prediction, sometime by the end of the decade. that prediction is based on technological feasibility and a lot of it is people, companies, whether they get it or not."

See Spot run! See spot compile the Linux kernel! Carnegie Mellon has a long history of wearables research, going back to the Vu-man series of computers in 1991. The current forefront of research at CMU is represented by Spot, a StrongArm-based research wearable in initial fabrication right now. "We'll get metal in November, and that means I'll be able to do the kernel bring-up around New Year's. Essentially, once you have an electronic layout, when you essentially just say what components are connected to what, with wires, there's an issue of trying to cram it into a box this big." That according to Spot's originator and designer, CMU doctoral student John Dorsey. Dorsey is also the ARM Linux kernel hacker for the board that Spot is based on. "This big," in this case, means a tiny card with the footprint of a PCMCIA card, itself enclosed in a 6"x3"x1" oblong pod, designed to snuggle in any of several spots on the human body. That tiny box holds up to 256MB of SDRAM, as well as up to 64MB of Flash RAM, and a CompactFlash slot. "And that's pretty incredible considering the amount of stuff that's actually on the board, so we hired an outside firm to design that for us, who will lay things out so they will fit in that area."

Spot is not destined to hit The Sharper Image anytime soon, though. "I guess our immediate deisre is to make it available to other resarch labs and universities," says Dorsey. "It's a little bit feature filled for it to be [the basis of] a cheap commercial product at this point."

What about the research that went into Spot -- will you be able to raise your own? I asked Dorsey about the possibility of the plans for Spot being put on the Web for public consumption, and his answer was uncertain, but optimistic. "There's an issue of [rights] when an outside funding agency gives the money to design something like that, they have first dibs on the intellectual property. There's a trend that I see at this conference, probably the most exciting thing I've seen, which is that a lot of companies are trying to make their designs available on the web, and that's the kind of thing I would like to see happen. At least for people who are in the research community, there's no reason not to do that. It's cewrtainly saves horrendous duplication of effort, and really helps us to make progress. The important thing is that you just want to get the platform done, and out there."

Thanks to the GPL, though, Dorsey says it's not as important whether Spot's schematics are available, becauses the clue that a home-builder would need will be in public view: "There's a really strange dichotomy when it comes to what people will permit for software, and what they will permit for software. People don't even blink when I say I want to GPL stuff that I write for research, my thesis or whatever -- but for hardware I think there's just a different mindset. What Ithink is funny when it comes to hardware is that I'm allowed to GPL the kernel port for this board. And any reasonably intelligent person could look at the code for the various drivers and support, and sort of back out what's actually in the box. So it's a little bit silly to say you can't say what the schematic looks like."

Like most of the academic reasearchers in Atlanta, CMU uses Linux heavily in its wearables development. Dorsey does have a short wishlist for future developments in the Linux kernel, though: "Power management, that's the big one. I know that the WRL folks over at Compaq are working on that noe for the SA-11 family [the processor which runs Spot] in particular. I would like to see it show up more often in networking research applications. BSD really does own the game as far as that goes right now, and I need to do all my thesis stuff on Linux, so I'd like to see that happen."

Also with CMU and living proof that it takes more than kernel hackers to build computers onto the human body, Francine Gemperle has a background in industrial design, and now is a graduate student with the CMU Design Studio. Gemperle was hired when she finished her undergraduate degree a few years ago, to help make small computers truly comfortable to the users. Now the only designer working with the group, Gemperle has been working since last February on the conference's organization. "They actually thrust the job of exhibits on me, and it's been fun, I've enjoyed coordinating it."

She's coordinated a group of about 25 volunteers who helped put this conference together, and has spent the last year arranging sponsorships, speakers and exhibitors. "Getting people involved in this conference is a tricky thing, because there are a lot of people who are doing resarch in wearables [not in attendance], but having it cleared through their lawyers and PR departments is another story. So there are many big companies that we know of that are actively pursuing wearables, but who aren't here. I think there were some people here from Motorola beofer, and everybody knows that IBM is pursuing wearables, but they don't really show up here." (IBM was demonstrating their Linux-equipped wristwatches, in fact, but did not exhibit any results of their wearable Thinkpad project.)

Charmed, I'm sure Brad Singletary, a PhD candidate at Georgia Tech, was one of the several poster exhibitors, explaining to passers by his current research project, which is one likely to have an impact on other wearable endeavors as well. Singletary is building a database of faces (which now includes a mugshot of me), recorded with a pair of helmet-mounted video cameras (one color, one black and white) onto a pair of DV decks worn in his clothing, to be used later as the basis of a recognition program.

Pointing to small white "X"s on the visor of his Glasstron display, Singletary says "I can line these X's up with your eyes, and then I push a button which records audio along with the video track, to tell me where your face is in the video stream. I push the button and then it just starts firing automatically."

He's trying to create a simple recognition algorithm rather than the unweildy multi-point ones currently in use. "It's differnet from the traditional face recognition; that's what the military wants, they want full 3-D recognition. I also want to help people with prosophagnosia - face blindness ... I'd like to help those people, give them some way to recognize people."

In addition to that disparate pair of users, he says, "Another is police, regular police ... infrared will allow them to function in the dark. But there are also more prosaic uses: " A typical businessman who walks into a conference, he wants to know 'Who do I know?' Who they are, and if he's met them before."

Of the odd-looking yellow piece on the back of his helmet, Thompson sheepishly admits "The dumbell is for balance. I built this thing as quickly as possible."

Singeltary's graduate advisor, Thad Starner, along with fellow graduate student Daniel Ashbrook and long-time wearables enthusiast and hobbiest (and Vassar College employee) Greg Priest-Dorman, are now not only academics, but entrepreneurs. All are part of Tharner's brainchild, Charmed Technology. Charmed's approach to wearable computers is different from that of well-known commerical producers VIA and Xybernaut: rather than invest in ultra-miniaturized cases and custom motherboard designs, they decided to go with commodity PC-104 boards, contained in a case which gains in affordability what it compromises in size. Designed by Priest-Dorman, the case features a slight bend for greter body conformance, and is designed to be worn either in a vest or carried in a hip-hugging bag.

Perhaps most exciting is that in addition to their plans to start shipping in November kit-based systems based on these designs for about $2,000 (a pittance in the wearables market), they're also making the plans available to anyone who cares to download them. "So we have these plans, and they're actually on the Web site, you can download them and build them yourself, you can take them to a metal shop and have them build it," says Ashbrook. "It's totally open source."

One polyfleece vest to bind them all! One of the few places with a strong claim as the birthplace of wearable computing, MIT remains perhaps the most famous breeding ground. While Charmed makes low-cost and easy assembly a priority,resulting in a slightly larger box, a project spearheaded by graduate student DeVaul called Mithril, out of MIT's Media Lab, takes a completely different tack, pushing the components of its wearable system into near invisibility. While nanotechnology hasn't yet advanced to the point where processor, memory and battery can simply be miniaturized and placed in the wearer's navel, the Borg Lab researchers (yes, they really call it the Borg Lab) are convinced that until wearable computers are nearly forgettable, they'll never catch on. To gain the benefits of ubiquitious computing, in other words, the annoyance can't outweigh the rewards.

I got the scoop on Mithril first from Media Lab Research Scientist Steven Schwartz, who started by showing me the "Smart Vest" of an earlier project. "It comes out the Human Design Group, which used to be called Vision and Modelling. It's professor Sandy Pentland's group, and it's the group where wearables first started at the MIT Media Lab.

"The system started off as PC-104 configuration. And that resulted in system that were medium sized boxes with stacked PC-104 architecture, mostly X86 machines, and primarily running Linux. These machines were used with a variety of sensors, including cameras. But as the wearables project has evolved, we've seen a couple of different needs. Power is one -- power is the real battlefield. Batteries are expensive, they're burdensome, they're heavy. In a big pciture sense, batteries are expensive, right? Not just cost, the whole inconvenience. So we're working on a low-power platofrm. And in order to conduct our own research, we wanted it to look a little more "everyday" like. We wanted to be able to dress and act as we normally dress and act, so that the wearable computers we're using to research were actually integrated with our lives and non-interfering with the actions that we take as mobile individuals."

"For instance, we didn't want the computer to interfere by covering our eyes, or requiring too much unser interaction, or simply be buly or odd-lookingm because because you want to go out and see where wearable computing can help you in your conversatons with people, you certainly don't want that kind of distraction. So we started working on a clothing computer, essentially -- but with one variant. We didn't want people to have to buy a specific outfit, or let's say have to throw out the old outfit because they've upgraded their computer. So we dicided to make a lining, essentially a detatchable, soft chassis. And because we didn't want it to be uncomfortable, we got rid of the boxes, the hard packaging. So we went to soft packaging, distributed the electronics in a sort of very wide area over the upper body, went to very small modules, and started to implement some of the very low power RISC architectures. StrongArm, PowerPC."

"We started building these, and engineering them to work with MicroOptical's displays, so you could have very small clip-on displays that don't cover much of your vision, yet provide lots of rich information. WHen we think of rich content for wearables, we don't thnk of walking down the street oozing through a UXGA screen, because with tat kind of content you'd probably trip right down the street. Cyborgs don't like this. So the idea is that the type of informatino that you want as a wearable user is stuff that's compatibile with high mobility, and high levels of interaction, unexpected physical events taking place."

"So we built the system called Mithril -- it's a new platform that all the research will be done on. It started over a year ago, when we did the smart vest project," Schwartz says as he steps into a vest from that project. "PowerPC, WaveLan, Linux, Apache. Samba as a remote server. We did it to show that we could put a high performance machine intoo clothing that could be worn summer or winter by a man or a woman. ... my advice to people is that the ultimate geek is chic. When you can hide all that big artillery, heavy metal that we carry around -- the ultimate wearable computer is being able to blend in with the people down the street. To walk down the most expensive block in New York, to see the most incredible radio on display, try it out, hold it, feel it, decide I want to buy it -- and on my eyeglasses is flashes where I can get it on the Internet for the best price."

DeVaul and fellow graduate student Josh Weaver explained their computer-in-vest concept. Each wore a custom-made vest outfitted with special pockets, some visible, some hidden. (That by the way, is the entire world's supply of Mithril systems right now."We'll go home on separate planes," DeVaul joked.) Displaying the the 200Mhz StrongArm processor in one pocket (part of the central core, called Brightstar), then the IBM microdrive and reader in another, DeVaul asks "You want to know how much this draws? Around 4 watts, for the whole system." In another pocket, two smallish batteries (like most projects on the floor, the MIT group swears by lithium-ion camcorder batteries, which in the words of one builder "have the energy density of a hand grenade"). But those are not the only components. Wireless networking lives in yet another pocket, and a small board with three IR LEDs (and one green one, so the wearer can know it's functioning) is worn like a campaign button. Those IR LEDs are used to uniquely identify people or objects, to aid the computer system in knowing where it is, or "remembering" the identity of a similarly equipped person you encounter.

The whole system is tied together with a home-brewed cabling system, part of DeVaul calls the "Mithril Body Network," which integrates power and data delivery (USB and I2C) over a flat braided cable designed to wrap smoothly around the wearer. DeVaul invited me to try on his vest, and it really does feel natural.

"Feeling Natural" in fact, is one big element of the design of Mithril. "One way to think about what [wearable computers] can do is to think of them as personal assistants -- helping you remember information or accomplishs tasks in everyday life," says DeVaul. Context-awareness and scaleability are the driving forces behind his designs, and from the looks of it, building a computer that can not only communicate well with the devices beyond its immediate reach, but do so while remaining unobtrusive is a heroic task. "You only want the computer to give a response, say, if it's appropriate for it to do so at the time. If you're asking me a question, you don't want the computer to answer you instead."

And though perhaps a tricker project to assemble the parts and skills to complete, than Charmed's PC-104 kit, DeVaul promises that anyone with the desire will be able to build a Mithril system. "I believe in Open Source software -- continuing the tradition of Thad Starner, everything, including the PCB designs, will end up on a web site."

When will the future arrive? Never soon enough, maybe, but the future does have a way of creeping up on us. The conventional wisdom at ISWC 2000 is that honest-to-goodness wearable computing affordable to all and with many of the current bugs shaken out, is about 10 years away. One person familiar with MicroOptical's displays said that their plans call for a drastic reducton in price over the next two years, to perhaps as low as one or two hundred dollars. Processor power, meanwhile, marches on. When a 600MHz Transmeta chip is old hat, it will still be enough to run the same applications it does today. I'm looking forward to joining the cyborgs when that day arrives.

Once a year, would-be cyborgs and their creators congregate for a few days of catching up with each other and the state of the art at the International Symposium on Wearable Computers's conference, sponsored by the IEEE and corporate sponsors like Microsoft and Compaq. Ever-lighter and more colorful head-mounted displays, innovative input devices and boundary-stretching ideas on human/machine interaction conspire to attract strange looks from startled pedestrians or frank admiration from fellow participants. When ISWC2000 began Monday in Atlanta. it marked the fourth such gathering -- the event has been held in San Francisco, Pittsburgh, and Cambridge, Mass. ISWC is about equal parts trade show, academic conference, and family reunion for a visibly different kind of family. Since ALS had ended just one day before, I stayed in the Peachtree state an extra few days to check it out. Read on to see what I found.

Excuse me, is that a StrongArm? A survey of the show floor reveals that wearable computing in the year 2000 is still a small, specialized field. Despite cyberpunk literature, Max Headroom, AT&T "You Will" commercials and cell-phones equipped with earbud mics to get us used to the idea, the cost and discomfort of wearing one's own computer still makes it anything but mainstream. Input devices are awkward, displays are expensive and for the most part too obtrusive for casual use. The interface discomfort is more than just physical, too -- it's semantic. Many of the computers demonstrated at ISWC 2000 will run the same applications as your desktop PC (since they're based on shrunken X86 hardware), but simply aren't built for it when it comes to interface. Typing a letter is still easier at a standard keyboard and a conventional monitor than with a forearm keyboard and a monochrome eyepiece, in part because "typing a letter" is something we're much comfortable with in another setting. The niche that wearables will fill is still being hewn -- by the people at ISWC, in fact.

Unlike Comdex, CES, or even Linux World, there are no hordes rushing the door seeking T-shirts and yo-yos. The attendees mostly seem focused on the technology at hand, and catching up with what their academic colleages or business competition are doing. As you might expect, that means improving battery life, devising and improving useful applications, tweaking both input and output devices to be more intuitive, and making the actual hardware of wearable computing more comfortable.

Three basic groups come to strut their stuff at this kind of event: Systems vendors, component manufacturers, and academics. In a field as technical and experimental as wearable computing, rigidly separating the three is difficult sometimes. Besides which, some of the companies which could be selling wearables are at present still circling the outskirts before entering the field outright (like IBM, whose Linux-equipped wristwatches were demonstrated to oohs and aahs, and Compaq, whose iPaq is belt-mountable and capable, but not a "wearable computer"), and some former industry bigwigs have returned to academia, like Steven Schwartz, who headed research for Xybernaut before migrating to his current position at the MIT Media Lab.

The few true systems vendors tend to be focused on industrial and government applications, the kind of roles that can justify the latest, most capable hardware even if pricey: that means their market is focused on high-margin sales and hardware which doesn't much see the shy side of $3,000, but which is polished and presentable with ergonomics, true wearability and niceties like voice recognition and wireless communication present and accounted for.

The component vendors, on the other hand, span a huge range -- everything from budget displays (like the $500 M1 from Tek Gear) to materials which could serve as the infrastructure for future wearable systems, like the high-tech fabrics developed by Bekaert -- Bekaert's Douglas Watson showed me spool of thread I assumed was some sort of fortified cotton, or perhaps silk, but which turned out to be stainless steel. "It turns out that steel ends up having many of the same characteristics and flexibility as cotton or polyesther, when you get to the same filament diameter, he said. And at a company called Foster-Miller, Senior Engineer of Materials Technology Brian Farrel showed off the items on a table display which included military-stength cloth straps through which are woven nearly any kind of data cable, from USB to fiber-optics, or in some cases electical power connections. Foster-Miller also had vests stuffed full of haptic sensors, developed as part of a program to help fight spatial disorientation among pilots. (A gentle nudge from one of the sensors helps orient pilots who may have briefly lost their true orientation.)

Companies specializing in nothing but display systems, like MicroOptical and Liteye wowed visitors with their latest displays as well. The most-worn displays among the wearable-equipped, though, seems to be the lightweight Micro-Optical.

And probably most important in the long term, there are academic groups -- research groups from CMU, Columbia, MIT, and GA Tech are all represented. Xybernaut and VIA may sell complete systems to industrial users and the military, but universities are still the biggest source of design ideas and basic research in everything from software to analysing the potential of wearable hardware to cause musculoskeletal distress. (More about academic types on Friday.)

Established players If you're looking to buy a wearable system outright (or have a few pitched to you), ISWC is one of the few opportunities to try on a range of devices and actually play with wearable computing outside of the design studios and graduate labs of elite universities, and without forking over thousands of dollars.

There are relatively few companies who've been around long enough or sold enough computers to call major players in the wearables market, but two old names in the young field are VIA and Xybernaut, both of which had booths on hand to demonstrate their latest machines and give hints about future models.

Xybernaut, perhaps the best recognized name among wearable manufacturers, demonstrated several variations on their XXXX. While it's hard to not call many of the devices around the floor "futuristic," Xybernaut's sleek machines practically define the term.

VIA (from high-tech Minnesota) showed their devices, too: their current model, the VIA II, is about the size of two very fat wallets, and flexes to allows the sides to fit comfortably against the body. Plans are also in the works for a model integrating a low-power 600Mhz chip and 128MB of RAM. (Now from where does that sound familiar?) The folks at VIA promise an announcement about that new model at Comdex, but there aren't that many lines to read between here.

Not-so-established players Tiqit, a commerical offshoot of work at Stanford's Wearable Computing Laboratory, demonstrated their "matchbook sized" machine (I say more like a pack of cigarettes), which they claim is the world's smallest complete x86 PC, and that it is shipping now. Unusual in that it relies on a 486 chip rather than the ARM, StrongARM and low-power 586s which seem to dominate the show, the Tiqt instead favors sheer tininess over computing power. It still has enough muscle to serve web pages, edit text, and do most of the functions that wearables are called on to do at present, with the exception of processor-intensive chores like speech recognition.

Another academic offshoot, this one from Georgia Tech's famed wearables program with Thad Starner is called Charmed Technologies (about which more in the second installment) -- but check out their site for plans free for your use to build your own wearable computer case, fitting standard PC104 board, before it gets slashdotted.

... but then I'd have to kill you.

John Murray, Director of Software Engineering for Pacific Consultants LLC, was showing off something a bit more exotic than even the other complete wearable systems: field-computers that PCLLC is building in limited quantities for the U.S. Army, having beaten out giants like Raytheon to build for the Army the ruggedized wearable system known as Land Warrior.

The system is built for abuse -- connections are all military-grade and waterproofed. This all comes at a weight cost that probably puts military-spec wearables off most people's list: around 16 pounds worth of electronics, batteries and cabling is joined by an external antenna the diameter of a gun barrel, a shoulder-mounted GPS receiver, a small flat-panel display and a full-color 640x480 prism display manufactured by NAME. The processing unit (a 166MHz Pentium processor on a PC104 board, mated to 800MB of flash disk and 64MB of RAM) is carried separately from the radio-spectrum communications module, which contains a standard 802.11 card.

Ron Hill, a retired Army Sergeant (first class), and now with the Omega Training Group, was in full camo dress and wearing the system. Murray pointed out that the cable connecting the wireless module to the CPU (worn around Hill's back) is actually a USB connection, finegled into military-style cable and connectors. Other than such specialized connections, though, the componenents themselves are fairly standard, just ruggedized.

If the weight wasn't enough to dissuade you, though, this might be: all told, Murray says the system costs ten to twelve thousand dollars per person. "But we're still early on. Those costs should drop considerably as we increase the numbers. That cost is with each system being built one at a time, and we're a small shop."

Right now, the system is running windows 2000; part of that was expediency, because we only had 9 months to develop the thing, and part of that was because the military wanted it to run with certain pre-existing pieces of software." Murray admitted interest in switching to a real-time OS such as QNX, or perhaps a Linux-based real-time system.

Try this on for size Not everyone fits into one of the neat categories of vendor or academic, though, and not all of the wearables at the show look like bladerunner props, either. Jonny Farringdon, Senior Scientist in Wearable Technologies at Philips' UK Research Laboratories, held forth in a booth festooned with heat-sensing bras, gloves which measure sexual arousal (well, galvanic skin conduction), and other oddities which might not seem odd for long. Specifically, two of the jackets on display at the booth went on sale this month in Europe as part of Levi's Industrial Clothing Division line.

"4 of the jackets [in that line] contain fully-integrated electronics," he says, pointing to a khaki parka, as he begins unfolding and peeling the velcro around a multitude of pockets and flaps to reveal the inventory of a small electronics store scattered through its folds, and headphones which snake through the fabric. "Microphone in the collar, GSM mobile phone, MP3 player, remote control. All hidden and discrete -- it looks like you're wearing a jacket."

He demonstrates the system integration built into the jacket/system with a sample phone call. "Let's say some one rings you up It knows, it switches the music off, it patches the phone call through the same headphones, you talk -- not into the collar, you just talk -- and when you're done, it hangs up and switches the music back on." And it works the other way, too. "If I want to make a call, I dial by saying your name, it looks at your number, connects the call, switches the music off. If the call is taking a long time to connect -- as GSM calls tend to do -- it plays me music in the background, then when the call connects it switches the music off. I can play you my MP3s through my phone."

Check back Friday for more on the academic aspects of the ISWC2000 in Take 2: Vested Interests.

ucribido writes "Here is an interesting story regarding wearable computers and other communication accessories utilizing technology developed by Martin Cooper, who is regarded as the "father" of the portable cell phone. The fashion show was sponsored by Charmed Technology which is a spin off of MIT's Media Lab. Check out the hot "geek" chics sporting the latest in info-gagetry. Apparently, the CEO of charmed regards his company as the answer to Bill Joy's warning that technology will soon wipe out mankind if not kept in check. Find out for yourself."