Personally, I think anyone who calls Steve the "Father" of wearable
computing does him a disservice. To me a father of a field has to do two
things -- he has to be the first to invent or otherwise devise the key
components of the field and he has to be the person who influenced the
second comers to enter the field. Steve does not qualify on either count,
and the evidence is pretty overwhelming. More importantly, such a silly
debate distracts from the numerous contributions Steve *has* made to the
field.
On the first point, Steve didn't invent the first wearable computer. Thorp
& Shannon's roulette system is 1961. He didn't invent the first wearable
computer with "visual output modality," Hubert Upton had a head-up display
wearable computer for helping lip readers back in 1967. There are plenty
more examples: C.C. Collins had a camera-to-tactile vest for the blind in
1977 (after 10 years of work), Eudaemonic Enterprises had their computer
before Steve as well. Some of the email in this thread has implied that his
early work was "a fully wearable integrated general purpose computing
device." What Steve did in high school, near as I've been able to tell, was
a computer designed to sequence and control flash-lamps for photography. It
had a HUD and he could program it in 6502 assembler via 7 microswitches.
While impressive, especially for high school, this is hardly what I'd call
a general purpose computer -- it is a field-programmable photography
system. Steve did invent the "Wearcomp," but this is a tautology: he coined
the word and defines it specifically in terms of the wearables he
designed. We could play the definitions game all day and make up a meaning
of "wearable" for which Steve was first, but does this change reality?
For the second point, Steve didn't publish about his high school work until
ISWC'97. (In answer to Alex Feinman, I've looked pretty hard for some nice,
hard documentation about what Steve did back in 1981 and I haven't found
any published before '97.) He also didn't talk about it much: I hadn't
heard about most of it until that ISWC paper, and I was his coworker and
collaborator. In answer to Tristam Metcalfe's comment about "MIT... the
labs and 'womb's in which Steve ultimately interjected seminal ideas into
then born realities" you might want to talk to those of us who were there
before declaring that it was Steve's ideas that influenced us. IMO, if you
want to father a field you have to get your ideas out there when you do
them, not wait until the field is well under way and then say "oh, I did
that already."
I write this not to bash Steve, but to point out that calling him the
father of wearables is silly. Much of the work was done before Steve was
born, and projects done in high school are simply not going to have the
same kind of effect on a field as a decade of work by several Ph.D.s.
More importantly, these "debates" ignore contributions Steve *has* made to
the field. Steve was not the first, but he was an early researcher and also
an evangelist for the popular press. His Wearable Webcam in 1995 (actually,
late Dec. 1994) got an incredible amount of media attention for wearable
computers. His performance art and video shoots (e.g. "Shooting Back")
brought attention to many issues of wearables and was good art in its own
right. On the technical side his video orbits, Bellows, Chirplets and
mediated reality work stand on their own.
Now, can we all please get back to useful work? :)
Bradley Rhodes
MIT Media Lab
Software Agents Group
Wearable Computing Project
[Note: I am not on the wear-hard list, though I occasionally browse the
archives. If you'd like me to comment to the list please cc me. I've kept
this note informal, but also have "nice, hard documentation" if people are
interested. My guess (and hope) is that most people on the list are not
interested in this debate, so I'd prefer to keep most discussion in
personal email.]
--
Bradley Rhodes MIT Media Lab | Software Agents Group | Wearable Computing
http://www.media.mit.edu/~rhodes/
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