Steve Mann: Pioneer and Extended Reality of Wearbals

Although head-mounted computer smartphone-level omnipresent has not reached, when the value wears XR (extended reality, something she and Charles Wyckoff Invented in MIT in 1991) These days gear as a professor of electrical and computer engineering, computer science and forestry University of TorontoHe does not turn as much head as he used to do.

Due to its invention and creativity, IEEE Fellow was honored for their contribution to wearer and concept Cosmopolia– With this year’s IEEE – the practice of using personal recording devices to see and reverse traditional monitoring power structures Masaru Ibuka Consumer Technology Award. SWip by SonyWas given by award IEEE Consumer Technology Society But Consumer electronics show In January, Las was held in Vegas.

The value is considered “Father of wearing computing“Asked what he thinks of Monikar, he says that it is less about the title and more about empowering people to see the world – and in new ways.

How their research and systematic devices can support and expand human abilities, especially vision, has gained profit for society. Among them are helping to identify objects and to see experts from distance to see what the frontline workers see visually impaired with the ability to enable experts and then guide them from a distance.

His IEEE award came a month later when he received Lifeboat foundation‘S Parent prizeLooking at a scientific or public person, “who has warned of future dangers and encouraged measures to stop them.” Foundation is a non -profit, non -governmental organization that is dedicated to encouraging scientific progress, helping humanity to avoid the risks of survival and is abused by rapidly abuse of powerful technologies including genetic engineering, nanotechnology and robotics/AI.

A natural-borne tinker

It is for this reason that the value will become a leading tinker. His early memories are welding with his grandfather and weaving with his grandmother-unusual hobbies for a typical 4-year-old, although not in Mann’s family. Long before the concept of his father, who worked for a men’s clothing company, complemented his income by buying and renovating the house. Tableau of homes Got broaden.

“We were always living in a house under construction,” the value remember. “I used to help my father to fix things when I was 4 or 5 years old – hemer in my hand – common accessories.” His grandfather, a refrigeration engineer, taught him how to weld. By the age of 6, he was building and building homemade radio. By the time he was 8 years old, he started a neighborhood repair business, fixing television and radio.

“In a sense, I was learning preschool engineering and science for me,” Maan says with a laugh. “I grew up by putting wood, metal, or clothes together. I knew how to make things at a very young age.”

Learning to see what others remember

When the value was 12 years old, his father brought home to a broken oscillaograph (an early version of the oscillation, voltage, or currently used to display variations as visible waves). This came out a decisive moment in his life. It is very impatient to accept that the wave dot on the machine display only went up and down instead of both vertical and horizontal, the value invented a way to push its image through the physical space.

He placed the oscillograph – which he now lives on a shelf in his laboratory – on a board climbing roller skate wheels. He connected the device to a police radar and paved it forward. When he realized the speed of the machine, combined with the vertical movement of the dot, created visual waves of the rods of the radar, as a function of space instead of time, he unknowingly made a revolutionary discovery.

He will later describe the merger of the physical and virtual world as “extended reality” – a concept that outlines today’s AR and XR technologies. This will not be the last time when Mann’s curiosity turned a problem into an opportunity.

Decades later, on the main floor of his Toronto house, he co-established DifferenceBehind Toronto -based company Museum brain-sensing headbandPeople are used to help managing sleep, stress and mental health.

Mann shared the 1970s Zerox Park Researcher Allen’sBelieve that “The best way to predict future is to invent“Mann, however, says:” Sometimes you invent it by refusing to accept the boundaries of the present. “

A member of MIT’s Media Lab

In high school, Mann won several mathematics competitions designed to challenge students at the university level. He enrolled in 1982 McMaster universityHamilton, in Ontario, to earn a degree in engineering physics (an interdisciplinary program that combines physics, mathematics and engineering principles). As a graduate, the value was already experimenting with early prototypes of wearable computers-head-mounted displays, body-wier cameras and portable computing systems that had been before the mainstream mobile technology for decades.

Maan (remote right) fellow MIT Media Lab sits with graduate students, modeling wearable computer or smart clothes that they were developing as part of their PhD. Research. Palm Berry/Boston Globe/Getty Images

He graduated in 1986. He continued his studies at McMaster to get a second bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering in 1989, then received a master’s degree in engineering in 1991.

After this he enrolled in a doctoral program MITWhere he joined its famous Media labUnconventional research combination technology, a hotband for design and human experience. He formalized and expanded his ideas around the wearable computing, wearable computer vision system and wearable AI. He also published some early academic letters, which described the concept of sousveillance.

He did his Ph.D. In 1997 in Media Arts and Sciences.

Maan’s doctoral research contributed fundamental concepts and hardware, which affected future smart glasses and devices for life logging, the practice of creating a digital record of someone’s daily life. He also helped blowing a mark for the areas of enhanced reality and ubiquitous computing.

Weave passion in a unique academic career

After completing his PhD, Mann returned to Canada and held a position at the University of Toronto as a professor of electrical and computer engineering in 1998. She says that she is equally fascinated how technology interacts with the natural world because she is to overcome obstacles between the physical world and the virtual world.

Their interests connect with him that he calls “wirementalism”, which considers technology as a limit between our environment and our “wiring” (itself). It gives rise to their vision of “Mersive” technologies that connect humans not only from each other but also to the environment around them.

“Go beyond (what is covered) school. Define yourself what you love. You will do it so much (even if a teacher or manager was not demanding it). AI can replace a moving encyclopedia. It cannot change the passion.”

“It’s advancing technology for humanity And Earth, “He says, wandering on the mission statement of IEEE. His guide theory explains his cross-de-regulation in Toronto’s Forestry Department (now part of the Faculty of Architecture, Scenario and Design)-Unusual entry on CVs of Electrical and Computer Engineering Professors in Toronto’s Forestry Department.

IEEE and Building Community

Prior to his groundbreaking doctoral work in MIT, Mann had already joined IEEE in 1988. He gives credit to the organization that Simon HekinThe radar visionary he met at McMaster, while he was in high school. Hekin pushed him to dream big, he says.

Has been active in value IEEE computer And IEEE Consumer Technology Society. He has served as an organizer, session president and member of the Program Committee for IEEE conferences related to wearetable computing and comprehensive sensation.

In 1997 he helped find International seminar on wearable computerAnd many other wearable computing seminars, conferences and events.

He has given the main negotiations and presented papers on topics including Sousvelance, Umpar Computing, and other humanitarian aspects of technology. IEEE International Seminar on Technology and Society And this IEEE International Conference on Comprehensive Computing and Communication,

His contribution includes impressive papers in IEEE magazines, especially various IEEE transactions and computer society magazines.

Perhaps his most famous paper is “wearable computing” published in Computer In October 1997, the magazine, seminal work underlined the structure and vision for wearing usable computing as a formal research field. He also contributed articles on Sousvelance – Search for Technology, Ethics and Human Rights Crossroads – In these IEEE Technology and Social magazine,

He has collaborated to develop framework with other IEEE members Weedable computing standardEspecially around human-computer interfaces and privacy ideas.

Forever inventor

The value continues to teach, runs its own laboratory, and tests the new frontiers of wearable equipment, smart clothing, and Immersive environmentHe is still operated, he says, with the same strength that operated the experiments of his backyard as a child: curiosity and passion.

For those students who expects to run in their footsteps, the advice of the value is simple: “What is covered beyond school) School. Do not define yourself from those classes or define the jobs you do. Define yourself what you love, you will do so” No teacher or manager could not take it “.

Mann says that he has no plans to retire. If anything, he says, his most productive years are not yet.

“I think I am a late blue,” he says, irony. “When I was 8 years old, I was fixing the radio, but my best work? It’s going to be between 65 and 85.”