Slashdot Mirror

An anonymous reader writes "Doug Engelbart should be known to everyone on Slashdot — he did invent the mouse after all, among many other inventions all of us rely on today. There was one more obscure device he came up with that never really took off, though. It was called the Chorded Keyboard, and consisted of a system that allowed you to type using just one hand. The key to this system was finger combinations, which allowed up to 32 different characters — more than enough for the alphabet. Now that one-handed keyboard has been ported to work with touchscreens, and it could end up being quite popular. The key benefit is the fact you can type anywhere on the screen and don't even need to see where you are typing. The only difficulty is learning all the key combos, but once you have them cold you may be able to type faster than with two hands on your smartphone or tablet." Bonus: being software-only and open-source, it's much cheaper than a Twiddler.

BJS asks: "I'm in the process of building a my first Wearable Computer. The last thing I have to do in it's construction is to make a heads up display system. I want to have something like an iScape2, a MicroOptical C3, or even this TekGear component, however I'm in collage so I can't afford to spend much. A friend of mine suggested that I find a broken camcorder online and mod the viewfinder. Dose anyone have any suggestions or experience in making their own HUDs? Does anyone know where I can find a broken camcorder or camcorder parts? And finally, what experiences have people had with making a wearable computer? Thank you, Slashdot!"

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.