IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - October 2015 - 96

Waving the bulb around the
vicinity of a camera, it would glow
more brilliantly wherever the
camera could "see" it, thus creating
a three-dimensional AR display into
the physical world.

(Figure 9). Likewise, my students and I seek to advance the
state of AR and metasensing as a solid scientific basis for CE
devices and ongoing research [11].

CONCLuSION
What have we learned from all this? Metasensing is the sensing of sensing, and, in many ways, it involves feedback, such
as video feedback or other sensory feedback. It is an example
of a larger overarching philosophy called humanistic intelligence (HI) [9], which is sensory intelligence that arises by
having the human being in the feedback loop of a computational process.
HI is not about replacing humans with computers, as is a
goal of artificial intelligence (AI). Instead of singularity and
AI, we should think about the sensularity [10] and HI as the
basis upon which to base our design of CE devices. In my
work, I try to live by the IEEE's slogan "Advancing technology
for humanity," and that is why I formulated the concept of HI.

(a)

ABOuT THe AuTHOr
(b)
FIgure 7. (a) "TV snow: Television camera watching the snow
melt," S. Mann, 2013, was a surveillance-based snow sculpture in
which the phenomenamplifier was powerful enough to affect the
world. (b) The lightpainting with a 1,500-W light bulb was powerful enough to actually melt the snow in areas where the camera
was "watching." In this way, the snow becomes a canvas similar
to the photographic medium. Other examples included the use of
steel as the canvas, using a 12,000-W phenomenamplifier to pick
up television signals of cameras watching the steel melt, e.g., with
the camera's gaze "burning" a hole through the steel.

simple and compelling. In this sense, I've taught my children
how to build simple AR devices and how to present this work
at their schools (Figure 8). Here, the basic principle is simplified: an infrared detector allows electricity to flow into a visible light emitter (light-emitting diode) in the presence of
infrared light from a surveillance camera (many surveillance
cameras have infrared illuminators built into them)
96 IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine

october 2015

Steve Mann (mann@eyetap.org) earned his Ph.D. degree from
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is chief scientist,
Rotman School of Management CDLab, the University of
Toronto, and chief scientist, Meta (www.getameta.com). He is
widely known as "the father of the wearable computer" and the
inventor of HDR imaging (first at digitally combining multiple
pictures of the same scene to improve dynamic range).

reFereNCeS
[1] J. P. Crutchfield, "Space-time dynamics in video feedback," Physica
D, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 229-245, 1984.
[2] S. Mann, "Wavelets and chirplets: Time-frequency perspectives, with
applications," in Advances in Machine Vision: Strategies and Applications (World Scientific Series in Computer Science), C. Archibald and E.
Petriu, Eds. Singapore: World Scientific, 1992, vol. 32, ch. II.
[3] C. P. Comeau and J. S. Bryan, "Headsight television system provides
remote surveillance," Electronics, vol. 10, pp. 86-90, Nov. 1961.
[4] I. E. Sutherland, "A head-mounted three dimensional display," in
Proc. Fall Joint Computer Conf., Dec. 9-11, 1968, Part I, pp. 757-764.
ACM, Dec. 1968.
[5] E. Shinn. (July, 8). Part man, part machine-All nerd: 'Wearable
computer' pioneer Steve Mann keeps one eye locked on the future.
[Online]. Available: http://wearcam.org/tpw_torontostar/

http://www.getameta.com http://www.wearcam.org/tpw_torontostar/

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