Game-Changing Wearable Tech

When does a technology demonstration go from interesting in theory to really drool-inducing? When you can see yourself using the product every day. Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry of the MIT Media Lab got my salivary glands in gear with their Sixth Sense demo at TED in February this year.

Sixth Sense wearable tech made from off-the-shelf components costing $350Maes and Mistry demonstrated a fundamentally more immediate way to access information about the world in the moment, wherever we are, without the use of a computer - a way that anyone could use - made out of off-the-shelf wearable components costing no more than US$350.

The Sixth Sense wearable system consists of not much more than a portable webcam, projector and a cell phone. The camera records whatever you are facing, the cell phone connects you to information about it and the projector projects information onto it or a nearby surface.

Imagine you could project information from the Internet about any object you encounter right onto the object itself or any nearby surface. At minimum, it would be like having Google results, Wikipedia entries and Amazon ratings on everything all the time without having to lug your laptop around, type in search criteria or even look away from the object. With a little more smarts, it could provide you with ratings of potential purchases or other decisions customized based on your individual criteria.

Get meta-information on anything or anyone just by looking at themMaes and Mistry demonstrated seeing ratings and annotations projected into the end papers and margins of a book in a bookstore. They also showed personalized eco-ratings projected onto a package of toilet paper in a grocery store. The capper was when they projected biographical information and a tag cloud from a student's blog onto the t-shirt of that student.

Who hasn't wanted to look up something or someone in the moment but not had the access or the time to get the information? I'm kind of a nutrition nut so I spend a lot of time in the grocery store reading labels watching out for things like high fructose corn syrup, salt and hydrogenated oils. How much faster would my grocery runs be if I had a device that could recognize a brand of tortillas and overlay a red, yellow or green rating based on my personal criteria the moment I looked at the package without me even having to take out my iPhone? That's game-changing.

Dial your phone on your fingers without taking it out of your pocketImagine if you could take a picture of something just by gesturing at it or dial and talk on your phone without ever taking it out of your pocket? Other parts of the demo, such as the ability to use your hands to frame a photo (like a stereotypical movie director) or the ability to dial a virtual phone dial pad on your fingers were more direct and obvious uses of the technology. They were fun to watch but I didn't feel compelled by them - I didn't drool.

No, the thing that really got me was how close to science fiction this combination of existing affordable devices gets with just a little thinking about how people could really use their combined capabilities. The information Maes and Mistry show in their demos is all accessible to people on the go today via a mobile browser or the right iPhone app. But as Maes said in her introduction, when you meet someone new you don't stop and say 'hang on a minute while I Google you.'

I mean that science fiction comment literally, actually. Watching the demo video immediately put me in mind of Rainbow's End by Vernor Vinge - a book that makes me remember why I always liked science fiction. In Vinge's imagined near future, the network is everywhere and everyone wears smart clothing and contact lenses that keep them in full-time contact with each other and with meta-information on everything around them. The information is overlaid privately on each person's point of view by their contact lenses. Like Maes and Mistry, Vinge does a good job of thinking about how people would use a new technology in their everyday lives.

There's more to the book, of course, and one thread is that the books in the world's large libraries are being shredded in order to digitize their content and make it available on the net. Fittingly, Vinge's book is available on Google Books.

Has technology accelerated to the point where it is only a few steps behind science fiction? I certainly hope so. In fact, I predict that in not too many years it will seem quaint to be accessing Google Maps or product ratings via a tiny porthole in your palm when you can see the same information effortlessly overlaid on reality.