X-Message-Number: 12896
From: Eugene Leitl <>
Date: Fri, 3 Dec 1999 13:48:42 -0800 (PST)
Subject: I am a camera

Total life history as source of constraints on the self blackbox? Wire
your kids early.

http://www.newscientist.com/ns/19991204/iamacamera.html

I am a camera 

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's 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


                 Photography: Black Toby 

                                                  

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.


So you're a pioneer of wearable computers. What are you wearing now?
Could you do a little striptease for me?

I don't 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't look too bad. The wires can be worked into the
clothing. Traditionally, artificial intelligence tries to replace
humans with machines, but what I'm 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't 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's an
inexplicable rise in heart rate that doesn't arise from physical
exertion.


Why would anyone want to do this?

We all like to remember things. You must have a family album. There's
a sense of really wanting to capture images and remember our visual
lives. Traditionally, you "point and click". But an even easier way to
go is to "look and think". 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's 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, "Wow,
that's a lot of people who'd rather watch my life than live their own
lives."


What's the difference between your grandchildren watching your EyeTap
images and my having to watch my grandmother's 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'm developing called Thoughtcam, you won't need to spend
weeks tediously trawling through the digital archive of someone's life
experiences to find what you want. You'll 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's 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'd
decided, I could have automatically summoned up the episode.

Oh, yeah. Hopefully, you'd 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't actually turn up to deliver them...

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 "fly on
the wall", this is really a "fly in the eye".  You're not on the wall,
you're in my eye, seeing the event more or less as I saw it. The
audience thinks they're 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's
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'll send me a message saying something like, "Hey, can
you look around the back of the sofa?"


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's not just a screen. It can also alter my
perception of reality. All the world's a Web when I've got my glasses
on--it puts reality and cyberspace on an equal footing. For instance,
I can block out real-world spam.  When you're driving down the highway
and you see a Calvin Klein underwear ad? You can filter that out. I've
come up with a mathematical algorithm that takes things on planar
surfaces and filters them out. If there's a certain ad that I don't
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't like?

You could, in principle, put them into your kill file. But there's a
practical reason not to: you don't want to bump into them.


Did you wear the EyeTap during your wedding ceremony?

Since "I am a camera", we didn't 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's bright and clear and traced right on the
retina. It's the visual equivalent of a hearing aid.


And people with Alzheimer's?

They have trouble remembering faces. The "wearable face Recogniser"
gives you that ability. It's 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 "natural" way. What
we're 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 "smart underwear" 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's why when I got married I sort of moved
away from using the smart underwear. Now we just fight over the
thermostat.



             From New Scientist, 4 December 1999 

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