Summmary of lispvan April 2006 meeting: Wearing Lisp
Friday, April 21, 2006
We had 11 attendees at last night's "Wearing Lisp: A Journey Towards Wearable Intelligent Systems" meeting of lispvan, including one new attendee:
- Kelly Murphy: Works primarily in C/C++ on Win32 but has been doing some work with L# (a .Net version of Lisp).
"Wearable computers have been, basically, applied in two ways - as 'laptop' replacements, and for analysis of biological signals. The first is driven by the need for hands-free, low-power, operation; it has been shaped by the available technology. The second is driven by a desire to identify mental and physiological states, in order to classify human reactions to stimuli, either to have systems that respond to the state of the wearer or to 'tune' other systems, based on the observed reactions. We wish to consider the use of computational elements as a means of enhancing human-human communication; the use of 'wearable' computers is a technical detail rather than a driving force."The following picture shows some of the clothing that was developed for one of the projects while the diagram illustrates how one of the skirts was embedded with the electronics:
Norman brought a number of movies and a whole bunch of documentation about his projects as well as some of the actual clothing. Since this material is not available online, I have (with Norman's permission) made much of it available on one of the Tech Coop's servers. The available downloads are:
- Movie of Norman Jaffe's presentation (~ 115MB) at last night's lispvan meeting: Towards the end of the movie, the sound gets a bit distorted as the microphone is capturing both Norman's voice and the narrative that is coming from the movies that he brought along to show us at the end of the presentation. You won't miss anything if you just stop the presentation at that point and play the other movies from the tarball in #2.
- Compressed tarball of the movies and documents (~ 368MB) that Norman distributed: This archive contains a lot of pictures, movies and documents related to the wearable computing projects that Norman has been involved with as well as some additional background material.
