Self-Described 'Cyborg' Reveals Promise and Dangers of Wearable Computers

If you saw the world through Steve Mann's eyes -- actually, through the glasses

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attached to his wearable computer -- you'd always have a computer display floating in your field of vision. As you walked across campus, you could simultaneously surf the Web or type notes using a handheld keypad. Or you could look at everything as a kind of television show, filtered through a video camera that brightened or darkened what you saw -- for easier viewing or just to suit your mood.

Mr. Mann, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Toronto, was one of the first people to propose and develop "wearable computers," now a growing area of research at colleges around the world. He has also taken an unusually personal approach to his work, turning himself into a long-term experiment: For nearly 20 years, he has worn a computer-vision system nearly every waking moment, trying out his latest inventions and learning what it is like to live in the physical and virtual worlds at the same time.

His eyeglasses look like a prop from a science-fiction film. A mirror positioned over his right eye beams a video display into his retina. A digital video camera captures whatever he sees. Wires run from the glasses to a small computer concealed in a belly bag under his wool sweater.

This is an older version of his "rig," as he calls the wearable computer. His latest model is smaller and more discreet, fitted into a standard pair of sunglasses. But that machine was damaged by airport-security officials, he says, in a recent incident that has led him to sue the airline. Repairing the damage will take months, he says.

"I think most people will eventually be wearing these things," Mr. Mann says. Or, as he puts it in Cyborg (Doubleday Canada), a new book he wrote with Hal Niedzviecki, a journalist: "One day we will all feel naked without our wearable computers."

Many researchers say that Mr. Mann is right about a coming age of wearable computers, and that his experiences highlight the technical and social issues that must be overcome before computers move off the desk and onto the body.

But some wearable-computing researchers say Mr. Mann is a poor spokesman for the emerging field -- in part because of his tendency to focus on his own agenda, which opposes many corporate uses of technology.

How to Become a Cyborg

At the university here, Mr. Mann teaches a course on how to become a "cyborg," a term he uses to describe himself. A cyborg, short for "cybernetic organism," is partly organic and partly mechanical. The most famous fictional cyborg is probably Arnold Schwarzenegger's character in The Terminator.

The otherworldly term highlights Mr. Mann's belief that wearable computers are not just a new kind of gadget, but the beginning of a fundamental shift in the relationship between people and technology. Mr. Mann's custom-built computer is not just a tool, he says, but an extension of his perception, his memory, and his identity.

He smiles approvingly when one of his students shows up for class attached to about 15 pounds of computer equipment, including two small speakers hanging from his backpack straps. "Are you downloading a little bit of music off the Internet?" the professor asks, noticing the speakers, a new addition to the student's wearable-computer system.

The student, Brandon Niblet, says that he had begun creating his wearable computer even before taking Mr. Mann's course, but that he recently started wearing it every day. "I'm getting used to people looking at me funny," he says.

Some of the six students taking the graduate-level course, however, are less enthusiastic about wearing their creations around the campus. The biggest drawbacks are the size and expense of the systems -- though that is likely to change if companies begin selling wearable computers for the mass market. For now, building a wearable computer requires considerable technical skill, since few commercial companies make the devices or the software for them. Mr. Mann says his computer glasses cost about $277,000; the computer system was extra.

Mr. Mann spends the first hour of class filling five chalkboards with equations, reviewing a technique he developed to enhance the digital-video images captured by wearable cameras. Much of his current research focuses on analyses of digital video, like developing programs that can identify what kinds of objects are in a picture. That could help a wearable computer detect what its wearer is seeing, so that the computer could automatically display relevant information.

Mr. Mann has also developed software that lets his computerized vision system alter the world he sees. He has set his wearable device to detect billboard advertisements, for instance, and to wipe them out of his visual field.

What Wearers Gain

The biggest benefit of wearable computers, Mr. Mann says, is that they allow people to communicate in new ways.

When he goes grocery shopping, he can beam live pictures of what he sees in each aisle to his wife, Betty, who sometimes wears a computer herself. She can inspect the tomatoes he picks up and even send images to his eye indicating which one she wants him to bring home.

The device also serves as a memory prosthetic. He is experimenting with a system that automatically records what he sees whenever he becomes excited or agitated, permitting him to review the recordings later. The system uses electrodes attached to his chest to monitor his heart rate to determine when something out of the ordinary is happening.

The technology can also turn wearers into news broadcasters via the Web, sending out live images of anything they witness. Mr. Mann and his students have attended protests in Toronto while wearing their computers, allowing them to disseminate firsthand images of the events before local television stations do.

Starting in 1994, while he was a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's famed Media Laboratory, Mr. Mann broadcast images from his wearable computer to a Web site continuously for two years. He quickly found that many of his professors and fellow students objected to being unwitting stars in a "reality" show. Some of them said that he was violating their privacy, and that he should not be allowed to wear a camera in their workplace. Others, however, defended what he was doing as a function of his research.

A compromise was eventually reached, letting him broadcast in some parts of the lab but not others. He also had to wear a red light, which lit up when he was Webcasting, so people could duck out of the way if they did not want to appear online.

Back then, Mr. Mann's wearable computer involved bulky helmets, heavy battery packs, and other cumbersome accessories. "It was always sort of hard fitting him in a car, because he had a rather long antenna at that point," recalls Rosalind W. Picard, a professor at the Media Lab who served as his thesis adviser.

Though Mr. Mann touts his devices as enhancing communication, the technology has often alienated him from his peers. In Cyborg, which is partly autobiographical, he acknowledges that much of his time at MIT was spent in "profound loneliness." Often, he writes, people would cross to the other side of the street to avoid him.

Celebrity Status

Today his work has made him something of a celebrity. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation recently made a documentary about him and his work, and news photographers often visit his laboratory.

If you talk to Mr. Mann face to face, however, you cannot be sure whether he is looking at you or reading the latest computer news from an Internet discussion list. The experience can be off-putting, at least to those who are not accustomed to spending time with cyborgs.

But Mr. Mann points out that humans have adapted to other wearable technologies that must have seemed strange at first -- eyeglasses, wristwatches, and such. "We've adapted to shoes and clothing," he says. "It seems reasonable that we should be able to adapt into a higher form of life that is with these kinds of machines."

Asked whether his gear could alienate him from others, he said: "Does clothing put you at arm's length from the world? Don't shoes prevent you from feeling the earth beneath your feet?" Even telephones were once seen as alienating, he adds, because callers talk into a machine.

Despite his belief in the value of wearable computers, however, Mr. Mann is a vocal critic of technology. In what seems like a paradox, he calls himself a "cyborg Luddite," warning of the dangers of some of the very technology he is helping to invent. "It's the difference between promotion and invention," he says. "Most inventors are just blindly promoting."

Security cameras are a particularly big issue for him, even though he's done research on improving small cameras. He decries what he sees as the invasive use of technology by corporations and governments, and he has organized a series of performance-art-style activities to make his points.

He has taken video cameras into retail stores, and when employees objected -- and they almost always did -- he pointed out the stores' surveillance cameras and asked the clerks to stop filming him, too. Meanwhile, he was recording the whole interaction using the camera in his wearable computer. He edited the results into a Web documentary, called Shooting Back (http://www.wearcam.org/shootingback.html).

"We can and must turn the tables on those who watch us," he writes in Cyborg. "What better way to actively confront the way we are being filmed by the infrastructure than to pull out a camera and make a record of those who are filming us?"

Some colleagues applaud Mr. Mann's emphasis on the social and political implications of technology. "Many of the researchers don't ask serious questions about the social implications," says Chris Hables Gray, an associate professor of both computer science and cultural studies of science and technologies at the University of Great Falls, in Montana. "So many of the new cyborgian technologies are actually under the control of large corporations."

Ms. Picard, of MIT, says that the debates sparked by Mr. Mann at the Media Lab were valuable, and that too often students fail to realize the social implications of their work. "We had to explore those social issues, because in fact here was the live, working system, and there you were on the Web."

Others, however, say his social commentary can be counterproductive. "It oftentimes distracts people from the research end of wearable computing," says Thad Starner, an assistant professor of computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who also specializes in wearable devices. He, too, uses a wearable computer nearly all of the time. But he rarely finds the technology alienating, he says. In fact, he sometimes gets tired of showing off the gadget to curious people.

He doesn't usually have a camera in his system. Instead, he uses his wearable computer much as he would his desktop PC -- to write papers and check e-mail. His current research deals with how to turn the wearable computer into a kind of "personal butler," automatically displaying information in response to audio cues. For instance, if you talk about scheduling a meeting with someone for next week, the computer might pull up your calendar.

Pros and Cons

Mr. Starner's wearable computer comes in handy during speaking engagements on other campuses, he says. As he meets colleagues, he can call up their research interests from the Web using a computer display on his eyeglasses and a small keypad. "They're very flattered that I know so much about them, or seem to," he says. "It makes you seem a lot more socially graceful than you are. It's really cool."

Others with wearable computer systems acknowledge that the devices have their drawbacks. Greg Priest-Dorman, a system administrator at Vassar College who frequently uses a wearable computer, says he tries to go at least one day a week without the device, so that he can still function without it. And he often takes his computer-glasses off when talking to his young daughter, so that she knows he is focusing on their conversation.

"There's a lot of potential for increased isolation" with wearable computers, he says. "I don't think the mainstream is ready for them." Mr. Priest-Dorman, who has a neurological impairment similar to dyslexia, says he developed his system to help him read by converting text to speech.

A Wounded Cyborg

A particularly difficult and painful moment in Mr. Mann's life as a cyborg came in February, on the way home from Memorial University of Newfoundland, where he had served as an external examiner for a student's dissertation. Security agents at St. John's International Airport, in Newfoundland, were suspicious of Mr. Mann's computer gear and were not impressed by the explanatory documentation that he carries. They eventually strip-searched him, he says, ripping the electrodes from his body, causing bleeding and damaging his computer system. He became so disoriented without his wearable computer, he says, that he fell repeatedly while boarding the plane. Laura Cooke, a spokesperson for Air Canada, declined to comment on the case.

Mr. Mann always draws attention when he goes through security checkpoints at airports, but he says that he notifies the airline in advance, and that he has been able to carry his devices on planes many times. He had flown to Newfoundland without any trouble.

He says he is still recovering from the incident. His students have noticed the difference. "It's not so good," says Corey Manders, a graduate student in engineering, who notes that the computer Mr. Mann wears these days, which is older, has fewer features than the one that was damaged. "He spends a lot of time crashing around, and I've seen him run into walls and stuff."

Mr. Mann has sued the airport and Air Canada for more than $600,000, arguing that their employees acted negligently and violated his rights.

Is it possible that once humans adjust to computer-enhanced perception, they can't easily go back to natural vision? Or, as some researchers have said in e-mail discussion lists, is Mr. Mann exaggerating his injuries to gain attention? Most of his colleagues have expressed sympathy for his plight at the airport.

Mr. Mann, for his part, is upset by accusations that he turned the airport incident into a publicity stunt. He says he has adapted to a world lived through a computer-enhanced lens. In fact, he seems more comfortable talking about his photographic world than about anything else.

"A lot of people maybe don't appreciate the visual world in which I live," he says. "I see a better sense of light and shade and balance, but I also see things in two dimensions. So I guess in that sense it's a long-term adaptation to that world, and sort of a commitment to see things that way."

Indeed, when a photographer shows up to take pictures of Mr. Mann, he quickly offers advice on how to light the shot, and he soon takes over the process.

"What if I put a light there, and, poof, really hit it hard?" he asks the photographer. It's clear that Mr. Mann has no difficulty seeing the image in his head.