Communications of the ACM
Wearable Computing Pioneer Steve Mann: Who Watches the Watchmen?
Steve Mann says Google Glass "strains your eye and your optic nerve because you're always looking above the eye. The generation-two glass, in which the eye itself is the camera, gets rid of those problems."
Credit: Nathan Elliot
Steve Mann has been developing wearable technology for the past 30 years, adapting computers, screens, and optics into wearable devices. Long before the arrival of Google Glass, Mann created a prototype similar to Glass with a glass prism over the user’s eye, with the entire device attached to a helmet and running on a 9-volt battery.
In terms of Glass, Mann says, "I don’t think they got it right. I think it’s a generation-one glass, and we’re at generation five now. Glass strains your eye and your optic nerve because you’re always looking above the eye. The generation-two glass, in which the eye itself is the camera, gets rid of those problems."
Mann wears the fourth-generation Eye digital eyeglasses he created, which are directly attached to his head and require special tools to remove. The fifth-generation Eye, which Mann is now developing, will incorporate a second camera and support three-dimensional augmented reality.
Mann disagrees with characterizations of himself as the "world’s first cyborg," a word he believes is vague, and prefers the term "augmediated." "We can augment or diminish or modify or otherwise mediate our surroundings, and the computer serves as an intermediary between the real world and ourselves," he says.
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