Who is Cyberman?
BIOGRAPHY:Steve Mann, inventor of WearComp (wearable computer) and WearCam (eyetap camera and reality mediator), is currently a faculty member at University of Toronto, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.Dr. Mann has been working on his WearComp invention for more than 20 years, dating back to his high school days in the 1970s. He brought his inventions and ideas to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1991, and is considered to have brought the seed that later become the MIT Wearable Computing Project. He also built the world's first covert fully functional WearComp with display and camera concealed in ordinary eyeglasses in 1995, for the creation of his award winning documentary ShootingBack. He received his PhD degree from MIT in 1997 in the new field he had initiated. He is also inventor of the chirplet transform, a new mathematical framework for signal processing. Mann was both the founder and the Publications Chair of the first IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computing (ISWC97). He also chaired the first Special Issue on Wearable Computing in Personal
Technologies Journal, and has given numerous Keynote Addresses on the
subject, including the
Keynote at the first International Conference on Wearable Computing ,
the Keynote at the Virtual Reality conference, and the Keynote at the
McLuhan Conference on Culture and Technology, on the subject of Privacy
issues and Wearable Computers. Steve's parents - his mother and father talk about how they were frequently covertly recorded by Steve and his brother during childhood. Steve's wife - Steve talks about his wife Betty, who has also been a "cyborg" for over 15 years. "I
wanted to be a telephone repairman"
- Steve discusses his childhood dream. Timeline of Steve Mann's workI AM A CAMERA: Humanistic Intelligence...Historical Overview/ContextThere is so much material, in a complicated web of interconnected links, that the only way to really organize it seems to be chronologically Thus I'll start with a short chronology from my early visions and embodiments of WearComp (wearable computer) and WearCam (wearable camera) in the 1970s to where we are today. Looking 20 years back (in Canada in the 1970s)
Looking 10 years back (in Canada in the 1980s)
Recent past (in the United States in the 1990s)
Present (in Canada, 1997, 1998)
[The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: 3.26.2000] THE HUMAN, WIRED: PART 2: EXCERPT
By Jay Bookman
Steve Mann can sound strange.
"For two years, I had 30,000 people inside my head, watching what I did every
day, altering my reality, offering suggestions on what I should do next," recalls
the University of Toronto professor. "I finally had to shut it down, though.
My head space got a little too crowded."
No, Mann's not crazy. From 1994 to 1996, while a grad student at MIT in Boston,
he streamed live video directly onto the Internet from a device that was mounted
on his head. Everything Mann saw and heard during his day, visitors on his Web
site could see and hear as well. The experiment allowed Net users to literally
view the world as Mann experienced it. From their computers, they could also
communicate directly with Mann, which gave him a rather odd ability. As he went
about life, he could benefit from the combined brainpower and experience of
those looking over his shoulder via the Internet.
Being
Steve Mann: Cyberwear pioneer alters his reality
- read the entire article on Steve Mann's website.
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