Wearable Computing: Through the Looking Glass

Thad Starner (Georgia Institute of Technology)

Wearable computing is now a part of everyday life. Bluetooth headsets, iPods, and smart phones are commonly worn in public and have much of the functionality demonstrated by early researchers in the field. Google's Project Glass, which has sparked the public's imagination, leverages experience from academia to enable (hopefully) compelling new lifestyles. Wearable computing will continue to enable users in new ways, and in this talk, I will describe some of the more unusual and surprising applications currently being explored by my group at Georgia Tech. These include Mobile Music Touch (a mobile, wireless glove that helps a wearer learn new piano melodies without active attention), BrainSign (a Brain Computer Interface effort which attempts to recognize sign language by scanning the user's motor cortex), and CHAT (the Cetacean Hearing Augmentation and Telemetry wearable computer designed for two way communication with Atlantic Spotted Dolphins). I will also describe our work in using wearables to create technology to help deaf children acquire language skills.

Prof. Thad Starner - Bio

Thad Starner is a wearable computing pioneer and an Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is also a Technical Lead on Google's Project Glass, a self-contained wearable computer.

Thad received a PhD from the MIT Media Laboratory, where he founded the MIT Wearable Computing Project. Starner was perhaps the first to integrate a wearable computer into his everyday life as a personal assistant, and he coined the term "augmented reality" in 1990 to describe the types of interfaces he envisioned at the time. His groups' prototypes on mobile context-based search, gesture-based interfaces, mobile MP3 players, and mobile instant messaging foreshadowed now commonplace devices and services.

Thad has authored over 130 peer-reviewed scientific publications with over 100 co-authors on mobile Human Computer Interaction (HCI), machine learning, energy harvesting for mobile devices, and gesture recognition. He is listed as an inventor on over 70 United States patents awarded or in process. Thad is a founder of the annual International Symposium on Wearable Computers, and his work has been discussed in many forums including CNN, NPR, the BBC, CBS's 60 Minutes, ABC's 48 Hours, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.