September 24, 2013
At the Huffington Post, Clive Thompson profiles a man who has been at the forefront of wearable computing:
[S]ay hello to Thad Starner. Starner is a forty-three-year-old computer science professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology who also works for Google.
But he’s best known as one of the few people on the planet with years of experience using a wearable computer. The guts of the computer are the size of a small soft-cover book, strapped to his torso in what amounts to a high-tech man purse. And what’s most prominent is the screen—a tiny LCD clipped to his glasses, jutting out just in front of his left eyeball. While you or I have to pull out a phone to look up a fact, he’s got a screen floating in space before him. You might have seen pictures of Google Glass, a wearable computer the company intends to release in 2014.
Starner’s helping Google build it, in part because of his long experience: He’s been wearing his for two decades.