From pacoid Wed Mar 17 04:41:37 1993 Received: by wixer (5.65/1.35) id AA13726; Wed, 17 Mar 93 04:41:37 -0600 Date: Wed, 17 Mar 93 04:41:37 -0600 From: pacoid (Paco Xander Nathan) Message-Id: <9303171041.AA13726@wixer> To: jonl Subject: WELL mondo files Status: RO Hi Jon - Glad yer back! Here's the latest M2k #9 article if you could u/l to the mondo files on the WELL please.. Thanx - pxn. ---- Virtual Telepathy Paco Xander Nathan 27 Oct 92 2100 words "Axxter felt his own head go light and vacant... A red light blinked at the center of his vision. A priority call, INTERRUPT status plastered all over it... He blinked to receive. The red light danced apart into words, no voice. THAT'S WHAT YOU GET. And a little symbol... The skull-pallete-and-brushes emblem of DeathPix." Laptop/notebook/palmtop spew spearheaded the Incredible Shrinking Computer Revolution with all it's digital mobility, wireless networking. However, these metaphors are still Desktops, albeit smaller. Staring at a screen, tapping on a QWERTY, doodling with an input pen - tasks well suited for some measly lab assistant but not for a Mondoid on the run, desperately busy at work/trouble/play. Nothing like K.W. Jeter's seemingly feasible technovision (excerpted above) from "Farewell Horizontal"... Enter homebrew hack Douglas Platt of Select Tech Inc: "Eventually, I don't see any reason for having a desktop." Platt backs his words by awesome specs: i386 25MHz, upto 8 Mb RAM, standard PC ports, rugged 120 Mb drive, Private Eye display (3 oz heads-up display, appears as full 720x280 screen floating transparently in space), with a battery life of 4 hours. "My present unit is mounted in a fanny pack - weighs about 4 lbs w/ batteries." Costs around $3500. BFD is you get to wear Platt's system, which leaves limbs free to fulfill a human side of the emerging cyborg equation. Use a computer without having to lock your butt in a chair or jam legs under a desk or fuse both hands to a QWERTY keyboard nightmare. A small 7 key, one-handed chord keyboard allows rapid touch-typing (full IBM 101-key emulation by combined key presses), with a 1 hour learning curve for basic letters, numbers, punctuation. Tack on a cellular or wireless modem, and voila! Squidheads can now jack into the Net and still be free to carry luggage, open a door, execute fire & maneuver ops, etc. Platt is also developing novel headset cellular/wireless phones to add in hands-free voice: "You can literally be standing in the rain, holding an umbrella, handling a customer service call." Ou autre choses... "Pen-based computer vendors saw wearables as just a niche, a gimmick - but pen-computing doesn't work that well." Indeed, look through adverts for pen computers and try to imagine yourself working (comfortably) in positions those spokesmodels assume. Platt opted for a "chord" keyboard alternative - a problem, right now, because only court stenographers seem to know how to touch type on chord keyboards, but that's changing... Court stenos use fast chording for dictation; chording for computer interaction is a lot easier. Besides, Platt disdains the suburban technomyth that people can't learn new things: "After the memory training material is completed, I expect to be able to go into a company that pays $10/hr for 60 wpm pro typists... Gimme a janitor for a week, they'll outperform a QWERTY typist pro." Scurfing The Humanscale After about a month, Platt expects most people to pick up their word chording to around 100 wpm, using just one hand. Platt cites "less mental energy" required (less attention on How to input, more on What) and "one-hand-only" as features that draw people to chording. With all the Carpal Tunnel Syndrome litigation looming, chording might provide a major health/insurance advantage too. Chording and body mobility dispel the desktop/laptop/palmtop necessity of two anchor points. A major computer firm contracted behavioral psych consultant Ron Cruickshank of Optimax to study work productivity in its CAD/CAM labs. People with similar backgrounds and knowledge varied dramatically in performance. Cruickshank correlated their rates of performance/burnout with a sense of "self-permission" to modify one's computing environment. Swiveling a monitor, propping the furniture - physical adaptation of the computer metaphor provided the key to CAD productivity. Imagine how wearables, which offer intrinsic physical adaptation to humanscale, will boost the DNA-based side of cybernetic productivity. Over 25 million US jobs require typing: wearables could free a lot of those people from their desktraps. Millions more work with tools, with physical manipulation. "Working with mass instead of information - these jobs could be expedited by properly designed info systems," sez Platt, "But they're not because of the implausibility of using QWERTY keyboards while standing, walking, driving." Gumshoe Graphics Adapter (GGA) "In 1984 I purchased a strange, handheld computer made by a British company called Microwriter: it had only six keys yet boasted full word processing capabilities by using chords - key combinations - to create letters, numbers, punctuation, control characters, and everything else you'd want to do with a keyboard." Later, Platt got a Private Eye headband-mounted miniature display from Reflection Technology - "The image appears to be a sharp 12 inch red-on-black display seen from about a foot away." Platt spent the last year prototyping, testing his assumptions, convincing people about chording, building developer relations, etc. "It's a rush to be the only one at a trade show capable of getting info off a name-tag and into a hard drive while standing, holding a plastic bag full of tech lit in one hand AND maintaining eye contact at the same time. I also enjoy driving and writing, or reading directions to where I'm going... it actually improves my safety." Perhaps you saw Doug at COMDEX '92 as the "Walking Booth"... Meanwhile, Select Tech has competition brewing. Rumor has it that HP has a belt-based wearable in the works, while certain Japanese firms, such as NEC, head down similar lines. "We are thinking about personal environment design - architecture for the human environment," sez Hideji Takemasa of NEC's Advanced PC Design Center in Tokyo. Specs for several NEC wearables in development have been released, including portable offices, emergency medic assists, built-in cameras, satellite links, etc. Takemasa-san notes an important design point: "There are no preconceptions as to how they'll look or work." NEC plans to introduce a "Hands-Off" phone module in '93 (to be worn on the wrist) then advance into more sophisticated wearable designs. Hands-Off Info During the Summer '91 session at Carnegie Mellon University, a continuing education program for industrial managers spawned one of the most ambitious wearable projects to date. A student design project produced a portable device for reading blueprints - a PC-AT compatible with 3-button input and Private Eye display. Participants built 30 units during the 12 week course by tapping electronics design expertise of Dr. Daniel Siewiorek and manufacturing design expertise of Dr. Fritz Printz. Wearable designs now flourish at CMU, in the Engineering Design Research Center - an NSF-funded project. Philosophical bottom-line is that people want hands-off access for information: "That free's up more people, much like PC's freed people by providing electronic spreadsheets," sez Professor Siewiorek. "You want to merge communications space with computer space, to superimpose information on a person's normal environment. This differs from VR because you don't need all those cycles to create the illusion that you're immersed." You already are immersed, in the reality of your own life, hopefully. Vu-Man 1 was a 2.5 x 5.5 x 12 inch box, 2 lbs, worn over the shoulder. Vu-Man 2 (ready by end of '92) is a 3 x 3 x 1 inch box, 0.5 lbs, which clips onto your belt, with a separate 0.5 lbs, 3-button input ("hockey-puck sized") that can go in your coat pocket. Latest models use only 7 chips, including 1Mb EEPROM to hold images. They're used to replace Mac-on-a-Kiosk systems for campus info. Imagine a campus tour hosted by a wearable that has position sensing and links to university info servers. "Some people may not orient well with maps," Dan notes, "So show them pictures of buildings, then give phone numbers, etc., superimposed on the display." "Imagine CD-ROM manuals, like for car repair... Look at your windshield and the wearable display superimposes an illustration of how to replace a wiper blade correctly." Boeing, one of EDRC's industrial partners, is reviewing wearable designs with similar intent. "Use wearables to build wiring harnesses in custom aircraft design - instead of using printed templates, people look directly at the wiring while the system registers spatial info." Bell Atlantic, another industry partner, is developing telecom base stations: "Wearables use chordless links (inexpensive, confined to local area), then switch to cellular (higher rates) as you move away from campus." Siewiorek cites time-volatile information as another prime application area for wearables. Another CMU researcher wrote a program to track patterns in an person's meeting schedule, then extract rules to describe usual constraints. A calendar server takes requests for meetings, then negotiates on behalf of attendees using their schedule rules and personal requests entered via wearables. The server transmits/updates individuals' schedules via the wearables, sans phone tag. >From The Inside Out June '93 sets the target date for Vu-Man's follow-up, Navigator, which features speech input, cellular/chordless links to data servers, 60 Mb flash memory, and MACH operating system. "We think we can do real-time continuous speech recognition with a 66 MHz i486." Check out Navigator's integrated production: "We have a pyramid scheme," sez Prof Siewiorek, "We have wearable applications, wearable computer artifacts, intelligent CAD systems that lead into rapid prototyping, and then rapid manufacturing based on thermal spraying." System specs for a wearable configuration (power, memory, speed, etc., like you'd find on the back of a product sheet) get punched into a knowledge-based CAD system (which has been growing for years). The CAD system spits out nodelists, board-level circuit designs: "We can generate a new Vu-Man design in about 10 minutes." Physical design, including PC board layout, goes onto a paper mask and then to a robotic station for thermal spraying. The robot can build an arbitrarily shaped system, wiring and all, without any assembly required: designed and built from the inside out. Arbitrary shape implies system design for body shapes. "I'd like to think of a computer bus on your belt, like velcro, where you slip in modules for display, speech, cellular, etc." Vulcanized-Reality Mind Melds I ran into Select Tech and CMU's Vu-Man project on the Net, in a Netnews discussion group called "alt.cyberspace", appropriately enough, which perpetuates message threads on wearables. For more chord keyboard info, check out Netnews groups "sci.med.occupational" or "comp.human-factors" - watch for monthly FAQ on alternative keyboards. Wearables offer an extremely fresh counterpoint... Megacorps tout, on one hand, palmtops with handwriting- and voice-recognition as our next step into cyberspace. Meanwhile, corporate/military research pockets pour gigbucks into total immersion VR. Both strategies promote high-priced yet only partially effective solutions for personal comm in the conceivable near future. On the other hand, wearables provide alternate contexts instead of alternate realities. In the words of "alt.cyberspace" regular Geoff Dale, "Most VR is targeted toward immersion, whereas what we want is an overlay effect." CMU has world leading speech recognition tech, dating back to the seminal Hearsay project. CMU is now pooling it's technical wealth, integrating real AI results with smart CAD tools, advanced rapid prototyping, rapid manufacturing robotics, etc., to bring us working products. The future, today. Doug Platt contends that voice input/control may have drawbacks: lack of privacy, need for a quiet background, etc. "So how about Virtual Telepathy - two people linked with chord-to-display comm?" Two friends have wearables with radio data links. They're both wandering about - one in an airport, the other at a mall - chording to each other. All private, easily encrypted, feasible today. Maybe have the computers convert text to speech for earphone output. "An even more discrete virtual telepathy would use tactile feedback - the chord keys would vibrate information from fingertips to brain - no tell-tale earphone, just a hand in the pocket." Jeter would be proud. Expect Select Tech to offer kits w/ software, or full wearable units in late '92 or early '93. Platt's software will play a major role, to transit wares from desktop/mouse to the chord focus, so that wearable-based apps "won't lose the flow" as Doug sez. "The purpose of the shareware, TryChorder 1.1, is to popularize chording on the desktop, to teach potential HIP PC(tm) users how to chord..." Target apps for his wearable will be content-based: encyclopedias, public domain books (e.g. Project Guttenberg Library), biofeedback, suggestion software, idea developers: "Software to augment your intelligence, change your states, etc." So that we can transit lifestyles into the cyborgs we lust to become. Douglas Platt Select Tech Inc. 1657 The Fairway, Suite 151 Jenkintown, PA 19046 215 277 4264 dplatt@cellar.org Dr. Daniel Siewiorek Engineering Design Research Center Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburg, PA 412 268 2570 dps@cs.cmu.edu Kazuko Andersen NEC U.S. Communications Office 280 Park Ave, 21 East New York, NY 10017 212 972 2046 212 972 2044 fax ------- Copyright (c)1992, PXN. All rights reserved. First appeared in Mondo 2000, issue #9.