IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - October 2015 - 94

The real power of wearable
computing is to bring AR into
everyday life, resulting in 3-D
gesture-based wearable computing
in 1997, the smartwatch in 1998,
and, more importantly,
Digital Eye Glass.

"phenomenamplifiers"-devices that receive signals and
overlay them onto the real world, to make visible the otherwise invisible world of radio and television (Figure 2).

SWIM

directly drive an incandescent light bulb. Waving the bulb
around the vicinity of a camera, it would glow more brilliantly wherever the camera could "see" it, thus creating a threedimensional (3-D) AR display into the physical world. This
led me to inventing, designing, and building a variety of

When I was 12 years old, I built an AR wand with 35 incandescent light bulbs mounted to a wooden stick, driven by a
wearable computer, based on my simple observation that
real-world phenomena can be made visible by light bulbs
connected to an amplifier. I called it the sequential wave
imprinting machine (SWIM) [2] (Figure 3).
The wearable computer I built to drive the SWIM was housed
in a wooden cabinet with a shoulder strap and a control surfacing
for setting parameters like forward/reverse (direction in which
the lights were sequenced), rate, sensitivity, gain (amplification),
and bias (background idle level of the lamps when no signals
were being received). Input was from a rabbit ears-style antenna
connected to screw terminals, and output was through 12 wires
(every fifth lamp was connected to a group of seven wires,
through each of the five groups of seven, i.e., 7 × 5 = 35 lamps
connected by 7 + 5 = 12 wires) (Figure 4).
This allowed me to see radio waves as well as to sense sensing (to visualize vision) itself. A metaconversation is a conversation about conversations. Metadata is data about data. So, I
called this metasensing: sensing sensors and sensing their capacity to sense, e.g., to see what a camera can see (Figures 5 and 6).
The phenomenamplifier had two modes of operation:
1) a battery-powered mode at low wattages for use in a
darkened room at around 245 W, and 2) a tethered mode of
operation at up to 2,500 W, which required a long extension
cord trailing back to an external power source. Originally, it
was a 3-D AR system that required no eyewear to see. In the
original version, all you needed was a darkened room and to
let your eyes adjust to the dark and you could see the trails
of light from 3-D shapes overlaid onto reality.
By the late 1970s and early 1980s, I'd added various forms
of head-mounted display devices to the phenomenaugmented

FIgure 2. A long-exposure photograph of a television receiver
connected to an incandescent light bulb swept back and forth.

FIgure 3. A sequential wave imprinting machine developed by
Steve Mann in 1974, on display at the National Gallery in Ottawa,
Canada, April 2015.

FIgure 1. A long-exposure photograph of a television receiver
swept back and forth in front of a television camera to which the
receiver is tuned. Colored filters were used to capture a range of
signal sensitivities.

94 IEEE ConsumEr ElECtronICs magazInE

october 2015

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - October 2015