Imagine recording every life experience with a device built into the lens of your glasses. When an image excites you, the device snaps images more quickly. Meanwhile, your shoes count your footsteps, your underwear adjusts the room temperature, and your friends keep in touch via the laser beamed into your eye from your glasses. Strange? For Steve Mann, it鈥檚 reality. A lecturer in electrical engineering at the University of Toronto, he is the inventor of wearable technologies with names like WearComp and EyeTap. For years Mann was considered a crank. Now at age 37, industry is finally waking up to his ideas. Alison Motluk met him in his Toronto office.
You used to walk around with a big camera and an antenna mounted on your head. Did people think you were nuts?
Back in the 1970s, people would walk across the street to avoid me. But in the 1980s, I had a certain following. The change from 1970s to 1980s was helmets to sunglasses.
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So you鈥檙e a pioneer of wearable computers. What are you wearing now? Could you do a little striptease for me?
I don鈥檛 normally like to do strip shows.
OK, but what are all those wires doing under your shirt?
There are a number of wires, between 16 and 32 typically. There are also electrodes on the body to measure respiration and heart rate. What you do when you get up in the morning is put on this undershirt that fits snugly on the body and takes all the readings. It doesn鈥檛 look too bad. The wires can be worked into the clothing. Traditionally, artificial intelligence tries to replace humans with machines, but what I鈥檓 trying to do with wearable technologies is to extract intelligence from the human host.
How do the sunglasses work?
They contain a device I invented called the EyeTap which reconstitutes every ray of light that hits the lens. The glasses absorb this light and replace it with beams of laser light, which shine into my eye. This is under computer control. If you stop the program, you can鈥檛 see-they are just like blindfolds.
What kind of information can they collect?
If I am walking down the street and somebody pulls out a shotgun and asks me for my wallet, my heart rate will shoot up and my footsteps will slow down. Because the electrodes sewn into my undershirt are monitoring my vital signs and feeding the information into the EyeTap device, it will recognise something unusual is happening.
How will it respond?
By collecting more images. It collects up to 60 pictures per second. If I am sleeping, it may slow down to one picture every three or four hours. When is something a Kodak Moment? When there鈥檚 an inexplicable rise in heart rate that doesn鈥檛 arise from physical exertion.
Why would anyone want to do this?
We all like to remember things. You must have a family album. There鈥檚 a sense of really wanting to capture images and remember our visual lives. Traditionally, you 鈥減oint and click鈥�. But an even easier way to go is to 鈥渓ook and think鈥�. People place a great value on stories they can tell to their grandchildren. But right now, people have a mere scattering of images in shoeboxes.
How many years would it take me to watch your life history?
It could take your entire life.
Why would anyone want to?
It鈥檚 funny. When I began putting my EyeTap images on the Web, I had 30 000 people a day or so sifting through my site. And I thought, 鈥淲ow, that鈥檚 a lot of people who鈥檇 rather watch my life than live their own lives.鈥�
What鈥檚 the difference between your grandchildren watching your EyeTap images and my having to watch my grandmother鈥檚 video of her bus trip to Graceland?
Choice. In the future, imagine that you could explore the lives of your deceased grandparents or great-grandparents, and trace through the highlights of their lives. You could fast-forward past a bus trip to Graceland or go back to their home towns and see what things were like when they were young, and how much life has changed. And with a technology I鈥檓 developing called Thoughtcam, you won鈥檛 need to spend weeks tediously trawling through the digital archive of someone鈥檚 life experiences to find what you want. You鈥檒l be able to use your own thoughts and physiological states as a rapid index to theirs.
What do you mean?
It can read physiological signs. When you experience those again, Thoughtcam can pull out selected portions from the database. Right now it only works with the individual who put the data in, because it knows that individual鈥檚 vital signs. But the goal is to make it so that it can learn the differences between your physiological data and mine, so your mental states can sift through my data.
So if I had been wearing an EyeTap when my boyfriend and I divided up the housework last month, yesterday when we disagreed about what we鈥檇 decided, I could have automatically summoned up the episode.
Oh, yeah. Hopefully, you鈥檇 be able to index into that database and get into the same mental state you were in. These are what I call computer-induced flashbacks.
Much like real memory.
Yeah.
A lot of business people ask you to give keynote speeches. But you don鈥檛 actually turn up to deliver them鈥�
I give the lecture to myself at home. The sound from me is piped through the PA system and images from my right EyeTap are sent out through a large-screen TV at the front of the hall. I can hear the audience through the back channel. Everyone knows about the 鈥渇ly on the wall鈥�, this is really a 鈥渇ly in the eye鈥�. You鈥檙e not on the wall, you鈥檙e in my eye, seeing the event more or less as I saw it. The audience thinks they鈥檙e me.
But when I am here talking to you I am not seeing what you are seeing. I am seeing you, for example.
Most of the people I talk to already know what I look like. What鈥檚 more interesting for them is if they can get inside my head. If I am buying a sofa, my wife can look at the upholstery and tell me if she likes it. She can be inside my eye.
Has that really happened?
Yeah, often she鈥檒l send me a message saying something like, 鈥淗ey, can you look around the back of the sofa?鈥�
Your wife sits at home watching you on a screen and then she types you an e-mail?
Yeah.
And how do you get it?
Through the EyeTap. It鈥檚 not just a screen. It can also alter my perception of reality. All the world鈥檚 a Web when I鈥檝e got my glasses on-it puts reality and cyberspace on an equal footing. For instance, I can block out real-world spam. When you鈥檙e driving down the highway and you see a Calvin Klein underwear ad? You can filter that out. I鈥檝e come up with a mathematical algorithm that takes things on planar surfaces and filters them out. If there鈥檚 a certain ad that I don鈥檛 want to see, I can press Control-K and append it to my kill file. I only have to see them once.
What about people you don鈥檛 like?
You could, in principle, put them into your kill file. But there鈥檚 a practical reason not to: you don鈥檛 want to bump into them.
Did you wear the EyeTap during your wedding ceremony?
Since 鈥淚 am a camera鈥�, we didn鈥檛 have an outside photographer.
Why do you think EyeTap might be useful for the visually impaired?
The filters can strip down a scene to what you really need to see-for example, the edges of stairs or door frames. With laser light going right into your eye, it鈥檚 bright and clear and traced right on the retina. It鈥檚 the visual equivalent of a hearing aid.
And people with Alzheimer鈥檚?
They have trouble remembering faces. The 鈥渨earable face Recogniser鈥� gives you that ability. It鈥檚 got virtual name tags.
If a child used this EyeTap from a very young age, do you think their brain would develop normally?
What do you mean by normal? I could make the argument that traditionally a child grows up in the wilderness. A five-year-old child in a house with a ringing telephone and a TV-their brains may not develop normally if normal is viewed as the 鈥渘atural鈥� way. What we鈥檙e talking about here is evolution. Calculators-do they cause brain rot? Clothing-does it cause body rot?
Is EyeTap going to cause memory rot?
No, a visual memory prosthetic is a good thing. I wrote my thesis on WearComp. Standing in line at the bank, I would just chug away, get another bit of it done. Or take lecturing. I can bring a projector to class, plug my body into it and simply teach off that. Instead of using a chalkboard, I write on a notepad and just look down at it.
What were you like as a kid?
Before I started kindergarten, I was building electric circuits and was interested in electrical engineering. I had decided I wanted to be a telephone repairman when I grew up, because of everyone I saw, those were the people with the most wire.
How far could we go in wearing the technology we need to live our lives?
It was once said that a diaper is just a wearable restroom facility. There must be a compromise between what we wear and what we rely on the environment to provide. Wearable nuclear power plants are never going to catch on. But since we have smart floors, smart furniture, smart light bulbs, smart toilets and smart elevators, why not smart people-people equipped with information processing hardware?
Tell me about the 鈥渟mart underwear鈥� device.
The simple one that controls the thermostat can be anything. It can be wired into a sock or a pair of undershorts. It enters into the feedback loop of the thermostat. You basically just replace your thermostat with this little radio receiver. Then you put on the smart clothing and then the temperature of the room is adjusted to maintain a constant comfort level.
And if you and I are both in the same room?
Then we have a problem. That鈥檚 why when I got married I sort of moved away from using the smart underwear. Now we just fight over the thermostat.