AWE Eyewear Showcase
Photo: Steve Mann: Flickr
On arrival via the ‘red-eye’ flight into Toronto, the researcher made a bee-line for the ‘AWE 2013 Eyewear Showcase’ sponsored by META . In a lengthy discussion with Ori Inbar, CEO of Augmentedreality.org the researcher learned that the historical underpinnings for wearable computing now assembled in this ‘digital eyewear’ traveling exhibition;
“…also appeared at the AWE conference a couple of weeks ago and now it is here, so it adds to use this as an opportunity to create awareness to the fact that you know, Google Glass is not coming from nowhere”. (Inbar, O. P.2)
The ‘digital eyewear’ traveling exhibition (Inbar, O. P.2) stated ;
“… was initially contributed to by a group of pioneers in this space being Steven Feiner, Dan Qui, Peter Travers from Vusix and Steve Mann and when you hear their stories about each one of those devices, it brings them to life and it gives a great understanding of how this whole industry has evolved and also a sense of where it is going as well .… what we see here at Steve Mann’s studio started in New York about a month ago where it was the first time ever that we put together this collection of digital eyewear and Augmented Reality and glasses from thirty-five years ago up until today.” (Inbar, O. P.2)
Scott O’Brien, Chief Marketing Officer with ‘Explore Engage’, Sydney, Australia conjoined with (Inbar, O. P.2) attributing respect to the research of pioneers like Steve Mann who enabled his company to engage with large corporations such as Fairfax Media, McDonald’s and other large retailers in using augmented reality as a means for marketing. (O’Brien 2012, p.1)
“…We had also forecasted a movement towards wearable computing and our business plan was accelerated by a major project in the middle of 2010 related to wearable computing so we felt I guess, luckily enough in our first six months validated to be targeting augmented reality and wearable computing.” (O’Brien 2012, p.1)
Simon Randall, Content Intelligence Officer with Oxford Medical Group, London, United Kingdom joined (O’Brien 2012, p.1); (Inbar 2013, p.2); (Manson 2013, p.3); (Brown 2013, p.7) in confirming with the Researcher at ISTAS’13 the contribution of Steve Mann and Gordon Bell, Microsoft Research in the domain of wearable computing, remarked;
“…The Autographer life-logging camera (Randall 2013, p.4) remarks “…it bubbled out so we didn’t...we were not lying in the bath and suddenly went ah-ha.” (Randall 2013, p.4)
The SenseCam (Hodges et al. 2006) ‘…then that bubbled into this’ stated (Randall 2013, p.4) pointing to the Autographer device he was wearing like a pendant around his neck at the IEEE 2013 ISTAS’13 Conference at Toronto University, Canada.
