New interface technologies bring wearable computers closer to reality

• Wearable Computing for the Commons Sick of loose paper scraps and inconvenient PDAs, Thad Starner's Context Computing Group has simple solutions with a common sense approach for wearable computers.
• One of his most successful inventions, says Georgia Tech professor Thad Starner, is a four-inch strip of Velcro that sticks his "Twiddler" keyboard to the side of his shoulder bag.
• The Twiddler is a handheld chording keyboard manufactured by the Handkey corporation, and the Velcro lets Starner grab his keyboard and start typing in just two seconds flat.
• Indeed, speed of access is one of the determining factors in whether a mobile information device will be used for mundane and casual tasks, according to a paper Starner recently published.
• These and other findings are based not only on personal introspection, but on the observations of literally hundreds of human subjects that have been tested by the Context Computing Group at Georgia Tech's Graphics, Visualization and Usability center, which Starner founded in 1999.
• Figuring out how to get people to really integrate computers into their daily lives.
• Rather than committing it to memory, he grabs the Twiddler, bangs a few buttons, then sticks the device back in its place.
• At the Computer Human Interaction 2004 conference in April, Starner presented a study that he and his students conducted at Georgia Tech's Student Center.
• The researchers asked 138 passing subjects -- mostly students -- what they used to keep track of their appointments: their memory, scraps of paper, a day planner, or personal digital assistant of some kind.
• With the exception of people who claimed to keep everything in their head, roughly half of the people who said they used one method for tracking their activities actually used a different method to schedule the follow-up meeting.