Electronic gadgets an answered prayer for the forgetful

By Zatni Arbi

ALMADEN, California (JP): There must have been times when you bumped into someone and she knew you but you had forgotten who she was, what her name was, what she did. All you knew was that both of you had met before. But where? When?

And, as if to add insult to injury, you became even more embarrassed because, in the conversation that followed, it turned out that she knew so much about you -- where you worked, what car you drove and even the name of your dog, while you did not remember anything about her.

Wouldn't it be nice if you had a gadget that could secretly and accurately whisper into your ear who this person was? Or display her name on the transparent screens right in front of your eyes? Accurate is the keyword, here, because if the gadget gave you wrong information, you would find yourself in an even more humiliating situation.

Pieces of the technology for this gadget are already available, as demonstrated by Cameron S. Miners, the lead researcher in the User Experience Group at IBM Almaden Research Center's DesignLab. He was showing a prototype of such a gadget called VisionPad to us, a group of IT journalists from Asia- Pacific countries who had been invited to their Silicon Valley lab to learn all the works they were doing.

Take a look at the accompanying picture. The pair of glasses that Cameron is wearing are not an ordinary pair. It is a transparent, head-mounted computer monitor capable of displaying text. It also has a tiny video camera. Connected to a face recognition system, VisionPad will one day be able to identify the person you are looking at. The image of the face will be captured, analyzed and matched to names in a data bank, and then the wearable computer that you have on will unobtrusively project all the information it has found on the upper edge of the lenses. When connected to the Internet, the device can even retrieve the latest information about her. Sounds really spooky, doesn't it?

Head-mounted displays have been around for some time. Almost five years ago I saw one made by Olympus when I was at the colossal CeBIT in Hanover, Germany. And, remember Michael Douglas and Demi Moore's movie Disclosure, which demonstrated the use of virtual reality? VR uses head-mounted displays.

Today, according to Cameron, work is being done to use organic electroluminescent displays for head-mounted screens, which can project text on a pair of glasses with only about 10 percent power requirement compared with the conventional LCD head-mounted display like the Olympus.

Unlike the virtual reality gadget, however, the display should be transparent. "We call this augmented reality. The monitor screen is transparent so you can still see the real world around you," said Cameron. The display is used to provide additional information, and it can be anything from maps to blueprints to data retrieved from the Internet.

Needless to say, the prototype is still far from complete. How are we going to collect the data for the data bank of faces in the first place, for example? In the meantime, face recognition, which was apparently a hit in 1993 up to 1995, is still being refined. If you are interested in knowing more about face recognition, one of the best sources is perhaps the MIT Media Lab's page on face recognition demonstration (http://www- white.media.mit.edu/vismod/demos/facerec/).

A more immediate and realistic use of this technology is perhaps a gadget that Cameron called a sign recognition or sign translator. If you have been to Japan, you will know how difficult it is to get around on the subway if you do not read Japanese. I have heard so many stories about people getting lost in the underground mazes.

"Suppose you can aim a translation device at a sign and it can translate it for you, you'll no longer have difficulty getting on the right train to get to your destination," Cameron said.

The application can also be extended to more simple things like restaurant menus, and this reminded me of the few times I was in Hong Kong. My stomach was growling with hunger but I could not make sense of the menu that the waitress had given to me. Had I had a sign translator like this, I would not have made the wrong choice of dish.

Digital Jewelry

Cameron and his team are also working on what they called Digital Jewelry. Imagine, for example, that you are wearing a designer ring, a necklace, earrings and a watch, all of which are connected to each other using radio frequencies and each of which takes up one function of a cell phone. When a call comes in, the color of the light emitted by the ring, which is based on the Caller-ID feature of your phone network, will tell you whether the caller is someone important enough that you should excuse yourself from the meeting you are in to take the call, or whether it can wait.

If it is an important call, you will tap on your wristwatch, which is actually a Linux-based computer with cell-phone functionality. When the caller starts talking, you hear the voice through the tiny speaker embedded inside your earring. When you speak, your voice is captured by your necklace -- or your tiepin -- that functions as the cell phone's mouthpiece.

The color of the light inside the ring can also indicate a lot of things, including the arrival of a new e-mail message or the news that your stock has just plummeted. The ring can also incorporate a TrackPoint, so that you can control your Powerpoint presentation without the need to hold a remote control mouse. The possibilities go on and on.

Cameron admitted that he became very motivated in exploring the possibility of putting digital electronics into designer jewelry when his boss, Robert Morris, who was the director of the Almaden Center, said that he would be willing to have his ear pierced if he could have something like the speaker earring for the cell phone.

Cameron's DesignLab was also helped by a Stanford product design graduate student, Denise Chan. Digital jewelry should not just come in any shape, as style does matter, Cameron said. The design should be based on both engineering and art. In the future, his team may be talking with exclusive jewelry design houses to design really stunning jewelry that also function as computing devices.

The prototypes of digital jewelry shown by Cameron are just some examples of what IBM means by the term "pervasive computing". At any rate, don't be surprised that in the future, your ring also contains a transceiver.

Zatni Arbi can be reached at zatni@cbn.net.id.