Wearable Computing: Through the Looking Glass

Wednesday, 20 November

11:00 - 12:45

Theater 1

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 experiments with Atlantic Spotted Dolphins).

I will also describe our work in using wearables to create technology to help deaf children acquire language skills.

Speaker

Thad Starner
Professor of Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology

Thad Starner is a wearable computing pioneer. He is a Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Technical Lead on Google's Glass, a self-contained wearable computer which was named a Time Magazine Invention of the Year. Starner was perhaps the first to integrate a wearable computer into his everyday life as an intelligent personal assistant, and he coined the term "augmented reality" in 1990 to describe the types of interfaces he envisioned at the time. Thad is a founder of the annual ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers and has authored over 150 peer-reviewed scientific publications. He is an inventor on over 80 United States patents awarded or in process.