more wearables

By anders pearson 09 Feb 2001

yesterday, i met Greg Priest-Dorman at a demo/lecture he was giving on his work on wearable computers here at columbia.

really interesting guy. he apparently has a neurological order similar to severe dyslexia; he didn’t learn the alphabet until he was in his twenties. he first got into wearables because he wanted to be able to have his computer read to him (via the text-to-speech capabilities of emacspeak (which he currently runs the developer mailing list for)) while he went about his ordinary business. once he had this basically working, he realized that he needed simple controls for pausing and repeating sections etc. that necessitated some kind of input device that he could also wear. this evolved over the years into his own homemade chorded keyboard. his rig now also includes a display as well.

he is a big proponent of DIY wearables and spoke mostly about how to construct a rig using scavanged or off the shelf parts. he recommended using pc104 boards for the main system, powered by camcorder batteries, displayed through a Tekgear M1 head-mounted display and using a chorded keyboard built from a scavenged standard keyboard. he also ripped on the commercially available xybernaut wearables for being bulky, uncomfortable, expensive and not hackable and the twiddler chorded keyboard for being generally difficult to use.

he has also designed a wearable kit for charmed technologies that you can either download the specs for (for free) or purchase from them (for about $2000 with no peripherals). so for about as much as a decent laptop, you can get a relatively lo-tek but fairly hackable wearable rig. hmm….