Re: Rebuilding wearable...

From Wear-Hard Mailing list Archive (WH) Maintained by R. Paul McCarty

On 4/22/06, Vitorio Miliano <> wrote:
> What is the focus of the work you're doing (both you personally and GA
> Tech in general)?  http://wearables.gatech.edu/ seems to be down right no=
w.

Sigh... they're supposed to actually point that to the ISWC site. Our
group's site is http://www.cc.gatech.edu/ccg/ . The group is slowly
changing focus from a primarily machine-learning and computer-vision
perspective to a more HCI-based approach. I'm writing this sitting in
a hotel room in Montreal to attend CHI, for example. =3D)

One of our basic research questions (and the one most likely to
receive funding...) is "what happens when your mobile phone becomes
your primary or only computer?" This research effort is in its very
early stages, but to start we're looking at mobile and social games
involving on-body sensing. This is the area I'm working in.

We're also continuing the sign language work Thad started at MIT. We
have some really neat games to help deaf kids learn sign language
better. And we're continuing to look at interface issues with
wearables in general, such as studying input and output.

> Is there concern about your work's potential lack of general-purpose
> applicability given the $4k up-front cost?  Is there any desire to
> produce software and hardware that could work in the mass market?

Nope and and maybe. We're primarily funding- and publishing- driven
rather than consumer-driven. Maybe a big company like Intel will give
us some money and one day use something we develop as part of a
project, but even so, we remain mostly publishing-driven.

> Could you describe your day-to-day wearable in more detail?  What
> hardware makes it up?  What software does it run?  What do you use it
> for?  How do you control it?  What is your data/applications split
> between it and your workstation(s) and the internet?  Do you still wear
> it when it's 95 degrees outside and you're going jogging?  Etc.

It's based on the Intel Stargate. It's a 400MHz Xscale board with 64MB
RAM, USB host and Bluetooth. It's got 2 CF slots, one of which has an
IOData CFXGA VGA out card in it and the other with a 4GB flash disk.
I've got a Twiddler2 that I hacked to put a PS/2->USB converter into
so I don't have extra cables. The Stargate is held in a DV tape case
that I chopped up, with a second case stuck to it with electrical tape
that holds a USB hub. Attached to the ends of the two cases is a
battery sled with a Datel DC/DC converter that changes the 7.2V from
the Sony camcorder battery into 5V for the Stargate. My display is a
MicroOptical SV-3 that I hacked a bit to mount on my glasses with a
magnet. And right now I'm trying to use a Netgear MA111 USB wireless
card to connect to the hotel wireless but I'm not having the best time
of it.

On the software side, I run Debian Linux with WindowMaker. I mostly
live in my editor (vile). I generally take notes in class and
conferences on the wearable. It's actually still too big and bulky for
me to carry around to the grocery store, for example. So generally,
no, I don't wear it jogging. =3D)

dan

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