You should see me now, looking like Jean-Luc Picard that time when he was captured by the dreaded Borg and turned into one of them: half-man, half-machine. Part of my face and most of the top of my head are covered by evil-looking electronic gadgetry; there is more scary stuff strapped to my left wrist and around my waist. Getting into character, I wander around a giant shopping mall in Fairfax, just outside Washington, D.C., frightening the living daylights out of small children. It's all I can do to stop myself from intoning, like the captain of the Enterprise: "I am Locutus. Resistance is futile. Your life as it has been is over." When they see me coming, kids stop dead in their tracks and gawk. Grown-ups turn away, feigning a sudden interest in the nearest shop window while staring at me out of the corners of their eyes. Heh, heh. I haven't felt this hip since I was the first boy in high school to get AC/DC's Hell's Bells album (Don't ask).
I look like an interstellar villain because I'm test-driving the Mobile Assistant IV, a "wearable computer" produced by Xybernaut, a small Fairfax company. It's hard to believe, but the doodads attached to my head and waist add up to a full-fledged PC, with 233-MHz Pentium chip, 32-MB memory and upwards of 3 GB storage. The keyboard on my wrist has 60 keys, and there is a trackball built into the central processor. Suspended in front of my left eye is a full-color vga screen scarcely larger than a postage stamp but so close it could just as easily be a 15-inch monitor. And did I mention the miniature video camera clipped to my shirt pocket?
The test run is going very well. I corner some unsuspecting souls and ask them for their impressions of me. One or two people say I'm freaking them out — apparently not much has changed since my high-school days. But when I have explained what the MA-IV is and can do, most folks pronounce it cool. Would they consider buying one? Um, maybe. (See the interviews on our website.)
Before coming to the mall, I tried out the MA-IV at the Xybernaut headquarters. I surfed the Web, first checking out some Star Trek sites (it seemed the appropriate thing to do), then the soccer scores and my e-mail. I considered playing an online computer game, but then remembered that I'm lousy at those. So I sent a how-are-you message to my boss in Hong Kong. For the first 10 minutes I fumbled with the tiny keyboard and trackball. But soon I was able to write entire sentences with relative ease — about 10 words a minute, against my usual 60. After half an hour I was comfortable enough to think and type at the same time. As a test, I wrote the first paragraph of this article and mailed it to myself. Easy-peasy. Incidentally I did all this while walking around the office; this baby isn't just wearable, it's wireless as well.
At this point, you're asking: What's the catch? Actually there are a couple. Problem No. 1 is that the MA-IV is no featherweight. All told, I'm carrying nearly 2 kg of paraphernalia on me: the heaviest bits are the CPU (900 g) and the lithium-ion battery pack (450 g). Being, ahem, somewhat heavyset myself, I scarcely feel the extra weight at first; but after 30 minutes my neck and shoulders are strained from wearing the 400-g headset. With time, practice and some gym work, I could probably get used to the load. Luckily I won't have to. In a couple of months, Xybernaut will launch the MA-V, the next-generation wearable. In December it will release the first mass-market version, yet unnamed (MA-VI? I don't think so), made by Hitachi under license from Xybernaut. Product specs are a closely guarded secret, but it's a fair bet that the MA-V will be less bulky than the MA-IV, and the Japanese-made version a lot lighter.
Problem No. 2 is price. The current model costs between $5,000 and $6,000, far too much for a personal computer no matter how high the cool factor. The thing is, the MA-IV isn't meant to replace your trusty iMac: it is an industrial tool. Xybernaut sells these machines — a few hundred, thus far — to companies that have a large, widely dispersed maintenance staff. Bell Canada's workers, for instance, climb up poles and down manholes to fix phone lines and maintain highly sophisticated equipment. Rather than carry a bagful of printed manuals, workers strap on MA-IVs, which have all the manuals on their hard-disk drives. If a worker encounters a tricky problem with a particular router, say, he can switch on his video camera and beam live images to a supervisor who can then advise corrective measures.
This, many computer experts think, will one day lead to cheap, easy-to-use wearables at your neighborhood electronics store. And chances are they will be based on Xybernaut technology. With the benefit of a 10-year head start and some valuable patents, the company is so far ahead in the field that even mighty IBM decided to join forces with it rather than try to build wearables from scratch.
Not everybody thinks Xybernaut is on to a sure thing, though. Over at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, scientist Steven Schwartz and researcher Richard DeVaul scoff at the notion of wearables as a consumer product. "Why would you want to surf the Net or play a computer game while you walk around?" asks Schwartz, a genial 46-year-old who wears his skepticism lightly. "How would you survive crossing the street?" His argument against the MA-IV is that it simply takes a laptop computer and distributes its components around the body. The machine doesn't do anything that a laptop can't. He adds: "There are no compelling applications for wearable computers."
DeVaul, 29, takes the argument further. A wearable computer, he says, is as different from a PC as a PC is from a mainframe. For wearables to work, they would have to perform special functions related to mobility. "A wearable has to be aware of where you are, what you're doing — and give you information accordingly." So, if you're passing a grocery store, your computer should be able to remind you that there is no milk at home and it may be a good idea to step in and buy a carton. A wearable can only work when it is "a semiautonomous decision-support system," says DeVaul. The software and infrastructure for that ambitious task don't yet exist.
The M.I.T. whizzes are working on it, though, developing a wearable known as the MIThril System. DeVaul says it will some day work as a "mental prosthesis" for people with memory and recognition difficulties, like those who have suffered a stroke or are in the early stages of dementia. "For a product to be viable in the marketplace, it has to have some sort of specific benefit to humanity," says Schwartz.
I think Schwartz and DeVaul are missing the point. Wearable computers, when they are mass-produced, will be a consumer product, not just a work tool. Their allure will lie not in their utility but in their look and feel. Nobody needs a personal computer to be tangerine-colored and lodged in a translucent plastic shell, but try telling that to the millions who have bought Apple's iMac. The academicians are also under-estimating the attraction of ultra-portability. In the public consciousness, wearables are the logical future — the destiny, if you like — of computing. Think of all those neat-o gadgets that populate sci-fi flicks and cartoons. The ones that grab the imagination are usually small, affixed to the wrist, the lapel or the belt — in other words, wearable. Or consider the now-ubiquitous Palm handheld computer. When it first hit the market, all it could do was store phone numbers and messages somewhat more conveniently than your old Casio. Then folks started to develop specialist applications — games, maps, news briefs.
When I talk with Xybernaut's founder and president Edward Newman, 56, another Palm analogy comes up. The small, wiry, onetime CIA operative — who looks like he may burst from enthusiasm — believes the upcoming sixth-generation MA will appeal to "prosumers," the professionals who embraced the first Palm handhelds. "Those guys will show the way for the rest of the consumers," he says. Newman doesn't know this, but he's talking about me: I still swear by my old Palm Pilot. Would I buy a wearable? Yes, if it weighs less than a kilo, costs less than $1,500 and — as cool as I felt at that Fairfax mall — doesn't make me look like a Borg.