Mann adjusted his glasses and pointed to the red spot of light that beams into his right eye 16 hours a day. "This is my office," he said. "You can get in touch with me here."
A professor at the University of Toronto who has been wearing a computer on his head for almost 20 years, Mann is certainly an extreme presence in the field of wearable computing. (He grew his hair long in the back "to cover the wires.")
But that field, once considered the realm of geeks and vertical markets, is gaining more acceptance in corporations as demand rises for increasingly portable, wireless solutions.
One company working closely with Mann to spearhead the wearable-computer phenomenon is Xybernaut. The company in March secured a US patent on a "transferable core," which is basically a PC Card-size computer that contains all the brains and guts of a PC: DSP (digital-signal processor), CPU, memory, storage, I/O circuitryââ,¬"just about everything except the display and the keyboard.
Xybernaut's idea is simple: to provide mobile workers with all the information they need to do their jobs.
When plugged into a specialised slot on any given deviceââ,¬"be it a desktop, laptop, wearable computer, car dashboard or other device, depending on which enterprises want to support the idea -ââ,¬" the core becomes a personal computer.
Xybernaut officials reported that IBM and several Japanese computer makers plan to build new lines of notebook computers that will support this removable core.
In the meantime, Xybernaut is developing additional models of its MA (Mobile Appliance) wearable computer.
The current model of the company's MA IV is a head-mounted PC with a color display, touch-screen tablet, wrist keyboard, 233MHz Pentium MMX processor, up to 160MB of RAM and up to an 8GB hard drive. It weighs less than 2 pounds, half of which is a 1-pound lithium-ion battery.
The MA V, due early next year, was co-designed with IBM and Texas Instruments It will include either the 400MHz or the 600MHz version of the Pentium III and will integrate a lithium-ion battery into the rest of the computer. The follow-up to that model, the MA VI, will come out the following year and is set to be smaller, faster and less expensive than its predecessors. The MA IV costs around US$4,995.
Although future iterations of wearable computers will run a range of traditional desktop applications, today's devices are geared mainly for vertical markets such as inventory, bridge inspection, mapping and so on. Each new version of the MA will be more streamlined than the last, and each will feature improved speech recognition technology.
Xybernaut plans to put speech recognition on the motherboard, splitting the capability between the CPU and the DSP, which should improve accuracy, according to officials.
Xybernaut is by no means alone in the space. A handful of players, ranging from smaller companies such as Via to giants such as IBM, have been actively developing wearable computers. However, because Xybernaut holds more wearable computing patents than any other, chances are the road to such devices will go through Xybernaut.
What remains unclear about future MAs is whose processors, batteries and operating systems they will use. Now, most Xybernaut products use Intel chips and run some version of Windows. But Intel chips tend to run hot, and Windows' icon-based interface is distracting when displayed on an eye-size screen.
Xybernaut's CEO, Edward Newman, said he's looking at other options, such as Transmeta's new software-based processor, but he's being cautious.
Battery technology is standing still now, and there's not much Xybernaut or anyone else can do about it until the technology catches up with the industry. As for the operating system for wearable computers, Newman has no immediate plans to break ties with Microsoft, but he said Xybernaut depends heavily on the research of Mann, whose work he considers important to the future of wearable computing. And Mann said Windows is not the operating system for wearable computing.
"The icons get in the way," he said. His personalised wearable computer runs on his WOS (WearComp Operating System), which is based on GNU Linux. WOS is free of applications and, so far, viruses, he said.
Mann's computer incorporates what he calls "eye-tapping," which is laser-based technology that essentially allows the eye to function simultaneously as if it were a display and a camera. Computer data enters his eye all day, and what Mann sees 16 hours a day is a combination of the real world and the etherââ,¬"what he calls "mediated reality.'' Mann looks like the future and doesn't appear to fear it. "Maybe we can't survive naked in the wilderness or calculate the square root of 2 to 100 digits in our heads," he said. "But that doesn't mean we're not evolving into new beings."
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