Wearable Computing

I’ve always pushed for more “artistic” papers at ISWC, but there’s often a culture and communications gap between the technical and artistic communities. Joanna Berzowska‘s presentation on her animated kinetic dresses was a wonderful exception. The goal of her project was entirely aestetic — the hemline of one dress rises and lowers as if betraying (or thwarting) the wearer’s secret desires, and broach flowers open and close of their own accord on the neckline of another dress. But her presentation was full of all the technical details and lessons necessary to accomplish these creations. A couple examples:

• They used Nitinol (memory wire) sewn into felt to cause the motion. After trying many configurations, they determined that a tight coil was the best configuration to “set” the Nitinol, as it created the largest motion.

• Felt was the perfect fabric for a number of reasons. It’s sturdy, so when the Nitinol relaxes back to its non-set shape the felt will pull the dress or flower back to the normal position. It’s thick, so circuitry and wires can be felted into the fabric itself. And it’s a good insulator of heat and electricity, so the wearer is protected if there’s a short. It’s even fairly fire-retardant.

Yesterday I took a tutorial on building a wearable computer from the Intel-based Stargate board. Both the Stargate and for that matter the iPaq have a good form-factor for a Tin-Lizzy-style wearable (small, low power and have USB-Host for a one-handed keyboard) except for the big problem that they don’t have VGA-out to drive a head-up display. Kent Lyons has developed a nice hack to get around this limitation. (Technical summary follows.)

The hardware Kent’s using is IO Data’s Compact-Flash XGA card. Compact Flash doesn’t have enough pins to memory-map, so the CFXGA card uses the BLT interface to send just the pixels that change. (The card is designed for giving PowerPoint presentations from your handheld so they’re not worried about fast-changing scenes.) Kent leverages this by using his own modified X server that can use the BLT interface. It’s only 640×480 at 16 bpp, but it’s enough for text and simple interfaces on a head-up display. There’s code and a brief how-to at Kent’s website, as well as an email address where you can bug him to add more detail :).

I picked up an iPod Nano as a birthday gift to myself, and love it. It’s small and light enough to fit in my shirt pocket, and I’m finding that even 2 Gig is enough for a wide range of my randomly-sampled music library (plus podcasts, which is really what I want to use it for).

The one big problem I have with it (besides still needing to buy some sort of sleeve to protect its screen) is what to do with the headphones when I’m not using it. The ones that come with it are always a tangled mess after sitting in my pocket, and the Javo Edge retractable kind seemed fine on my normal iPod but now actually takes up more room and is twice as thick as the iPod itself!

The problem of “what do you do with it when it’s not being used” is one that watches and belt-clip pagers have solved but iPods and cellphones headpieces really haven’t yet. Even wireless earpieces for cellphones don’t have a place when they’re not in use, though at least they don’t get tangled. It’s a harder industrial engineering problem than you might think, and one that I think often gets overlooked.

I’ll be blogging from the 2005 International Symposium on Wearable Computers in Osaka this week. Please enjoy!

Sun Labs have developed a cute little Java-programmable board called the Sun SPOT (Small Programmable Object Technology), along the lines of the Berkeley Motes project and other small Ubiquitous Computing sensor boards:

Based on a 32 bit ARM-7 CPU and an 11 channel 2.4GHz radio, Sun SPOT radically simplifies the process of developing wireless sensor and transducer applications. The platform enables developers to build wireless transducer applications in Java™ using a sensor board for I/O, an 802.15.4 radio for wireless communication, and use familiar Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), such as Net-Beans™ to write code.

The system uses the IEEE 802.15.4 wireless standard that’s designed for short-range (< 10 meters, same as Bluetooth) with low data rates but also low latency and ultra-low power consumption — pretty much what you need for individual sensors.

James Fusia at Georgia Tech has just released Twidor, a Java-based typing tutorial for the Twiddler 2 one-handed keyboard that’s used on so many wearable-computing rigs. Experts on the Twiddler can reach around 50-60 wpm on the Twiddler (with one hand tied behind their back, no less).

(Thanks to Thad for the link!)

BlackDog is a great concept. It’s a flash-based Debian Linux machine that fits in the palm of your hand (400Mhz PowerPC and 256 or 512MB RAM), with just a USB 2.0 plug, SPI and MMC Expansion slot, and a thumbprint sensor. There’s no battery or power plug — it’s powered completely via the USB plug.

Plug the Dog into the USB port of a Window-XP and it’ll automatically boot up from ROM in about 2 seconds. Then it claims to be a USB CD-ROM drive with an auto-run program, from which it starts up CygWin and X, and then makes an X connection back to its own server. Presto! Instant use of the host machine’s display and keyboard with your CPU, computing environment and data (up to 1GB through the MMC slot). Unplug and the host machine is left just as you found it. Security comes from what you have (the Dog itself) and who you are (the thumbprint reader), though of course you’re still susceptible to low-level keyboard, screen and network sniffing attacks from the host machine.

There’s a lot we could ask for from a personal server that BlackDog doesn’t have, like automatic wireless sync-up with the interfaces around us, but this sounds pretty decent and more importantly it’ll actually work with today’s infrastructure and machines.

(Thanks to Steve for the link!)

Advance registration for the 9th Annual IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers, to be held October 18th-21st in Osaka, Japan, is now open. ISWC always brings together a great mix of industry and academic researchers from fields as diverse as interface design, machine vision, hardware and fashion design, and as program committee co-chair I can guarantee this year will be no exception.

Public Radio’s Marketplace has a nice piece on the company Actionspeak, which hires people to go shopping while wearing small video cameras. The claim is that the cameras are unobtrusive enough that the research subjects quickly find themselves acting as they always do while shopping, and Actionspeak then analyzes the video to learn ways their customer can improve their presentation or marketing. They’ll also do runs where subjects are asked to give a running monologue about what they’re thinking as they shop.

These videos might give some straight marketing info (like which family member actually decides the sale or whether to focus on self-position, packaging or price), but I bet the real win is in showing designers how their product actually gets used in the wild. The combination of seeing as your customer sees, along with the ability to ask about particular moments afterwards, is really powerful. Not only can you learn things you’d never learn from interviews alone, but the overlay of first-person video with explanatory customer interviews has much more impact on a designer than would a table of survey results containing the same information. (Take a look at the consumer goods video especially for examples.)

The English version of Wikipedia is about 650,000 articles, which comes out to about 1 Gig compressed database — that easily fits on a PDA / cellphone these days. I’ve been thinking for a while now that I should look into loading it all onto my Treo 600, but I see now someone has done all the work for me!

Erik Zachte has produced conversion scripts as well as detailed instructions on how to convert the complete Wikipedia Encyclopedia into TomeRaider ebook-reader format for Pocket PC Windows and Palm OS. Text-only version fits in just over half a gig, text + images is 1-2 gig depending on image down-sampling. I also like his “Build, Buy or Borrow” plan: you can use his scripts to build your own latest version for free, buy the latest version on CD or DVD, or download for free his semi-anually updated version direct from the Wikipedia server. That’s exactly the sort of “free as in freedom” software business plan I hope winds up succeeding in the new economy.