Eyewear Computing \u2013 Augmenting the Human with Head-Mounted Wearable Assistants

The seminar was composed of workshops and tutorials on head-mounted eye tracking, egocentric vision, optics, and head-mounted displays. The seminar welcomed 30 academic and industry researchers from Europe, the US, and Asia with a diverse background, including wearable and ubiquitous computing, computer vision, developmental psychology, optics, and human-computer interaction. In contrast to several previous Dagstuhl seminars, we used an ignite talk format to reduce the time of talks to one half-day and to leave the rest of the week for hands-on sessions, group work, general discussions, and socialising. The key results of this seminar are 1) the identification of key research challenges and summaries of breakout groups on multimodal eyewear computing, egocentric vision, security and privacy issues, skill augmentation and task guidance, eyewear computing for gaming, as well as prototyping of VR applications, 2) a list of datasets and research tools for eyewear computing, 3) three small-scale datasets recorded during the seminar, 4) an article in ACM Interactions entitled \u201cEyewear Computers for Human-Computer Interaction\u201d, as well as 5) two follow-up workshops on \u201cEgocentric Perception, Interaction, and Computing\u201d at the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) as well as \u201cEyewear Computing\u201d at the ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp)

2D-barcode for mobile devices

2D-barcodes were designed to carry significantly more data than its 1D counterpart. These codes are often used in industrial information tagging applications where high data capacity, mobility, and data robustness are required. Wireless mobile devices such as camera phones and Portable Digital Assistants (PDAs) have evolved from just a mobile voice communication device to what is now a mobile multimedia computing platform. Recent integration of these two mobile technologies has sparked some interesting applications where 2D-barcodes work as visual tags and/or information source and camera phones performs image processing tasks on the device itself. One of such applications is hyperlink establishment. The 2D symbol captured by a camera phone is decoded by the software installed in the phone. Then the web site indicated by the data encoded in a symbol is automatically accessed and shown in the display of the camera phone. Nonetheless, this new mobile applications area is still at its infancy. Each proposed mobile 2D-barcode application has its own choice of code, but no standard exists nor is there any study done on what are the criteria for setting a standard 2D-barcode for mobile phones. This study intends to address this void. The first phase of the study is qualitative examination. In order to select a best standard 2D-barcode, firstly, features desirable for a standard 2D-barcode that is optimized for the mobile phone platform are identified. The second step is to establish the criteria based on the features identified. These features are based on the operating limitations and attributes of camera phones in general use today. All published and accessible 2D-barcodes are thoroughly examined in terms of criteria set for the selection of a best 2D-barcode for camera phone applications. In the second phase, the 2D-barcodes that have higher potential to be chosen as a standard code are experimentally examined against the three criteria: light condition, distance, whether or not a 2D-barcode supports VGA resolution. Each sample 2D-barcode is captured by a camera phone with VGA resolution and the outcome is tested using an image analysis tool written in the scientific language called MATLAB. The outcome of this study is the selection of the most suitable 2D-barcode for applications where mobile devices such as camera phones are utilized

Performing and Documenting Post-Internet: Feminist Needlecraft and a Poetics of Surveilling

My doctoral research practice consists primarily of gallery-based needlecraft performances and moving image works made from the performances’ documentation. I have mended clothes belonging to community members, unravelled and reknitted yarn into new garments, and sewed labels onto the clothes of gallery visitors. These performances have been recorded using security and action cameras and the resulting stills and footage edited into new video works. My overarching argument is that, given that one of art’s dominant contexts is that of capitalism, in which ideas and objects may be defined in relation to their role as luxury commodities, one more ethically-tuned approach to artmaking is to turn away from the art market and adopt a feminist critique of contemporary culture that recognises women’s unpaid labour. Following the Conceptual principle of dematerialisation, I have oriented my practice away from commodity production and opened it to temporal performative practices, claiming feminist purpose in my use of needlecraft as a gendered performance medium. My performance practice of ‘total giving’ is a metaphor for the invisible ‘iceberg economy’ of women’s unpaid labour that props up and enables capitalism. A further argument is that since our everyday relationship with photography has changed in the last few years due to the saturation of mobile phones and surveilling cameras, contemporary lens-based practice needs to reflect new conditions of presentness, performativity and operator-less affect. These conditions have changed our understanding of the medium and our way of being in the world. My use of selfsurveillance and screens during performances models our conscious performance of identity in a condition of perpetual present-ness, the centrality of performance documents to contemporary life, and the possibility of experiencing affect from surveilling camera footage with its qualities of displacement and objectivity. There are thus multiple differing registers and histories to this work: the gendered nature of textiles and its feminist roles; art’s sticky relationship with capitalism; the ongoing feminist project to achieve equity and agency under capitalism both in and out of the art world; how camera phones and the internet have made us performers in a perpetual present; finally, how the ‘cool’ gaze of a surveilling lens might paradoxically invoke emotional responses in viewers. These differing strands have emerged as I have sought to analyse how my work might meaningfully and poetically contribute to contemporary life and culture, and advocate ideas I believe important for any culture’s healthy progression. A further dimension to this work is the emotional apprehension of transience, which has long been core to my photographic work and now extends to my performative and textile work. The Japanese concepts mu, ma, mujo and mono no aware are important. Mu and ma speak to consciousness of absence and transience; emptiness that is full of possibility; space or interval that is profound. Mujo speaks to the understanding that everything that is born must die, and mono no aware means consciously to attend to, and/or to take poignant, mournful pleasure in, impermanence. My work is also informed by the cinema term temps mort. Translating from the French as ‘dead time’, temps mort refers to the cinematic time before or after action takes place, characters enter the frame or narrative progresses. My final installation plan is to merge live performance with material relics of previous performances and video works created from surveillance documentation of previous performances. In doing so I aim to create spatial and temporal proximity between performed activities and their material residues and documentation, presenting both as interdependent, integrated artworks

'The emotional wardrobe': a fashion perspective on the integration of technology and clothing

Since the Industrial Revolution, fashion and technology have been linked through the textile and manufacturing industries, a relationship that has propelled technical innovation and aesthetic and social change. Today a new alliance is emerging through the integration of electronic technology and smart materials on the body. However, it is not fashion designers who are exploiting this emerging area but interaction design, performance art and electronic and computing technologists. 'The Emotional Wardrobe' is a practice-based research project that seeks to address this imbalance by integrating technology with clothing from a fashion perspective. It aims to enhance fashion's expressive and responsive potential by investigating clothing that can both represent and stimulate an emotional response through the interface of technology. Precedents can be found in the work of other practitioners who merge clothing design with responsive material technology to explore social interaction, social commentary and body responsive technology. Influence is also sought from designers who investigate the notion of paradoxical emotions. A survey of emotion science, emotional design, and affective computing is mapped onto a fashion design structure to assess if this fusion can create new 'poetic' paradigms for the interaction of fashion and technology. These models are explored through the production of 'worn' and 'unworn' case studies which are visualised through responsive garment prototypes and multimedia representations. The marriage of fashion and technology is tested through a series of material experiments that aim to create a new aesthetic vocabulary that is responsive and emotional. They integrate traditional fashion fabrics with material technology to enhance the definition of fashion. The study shows that the merger of fashion and technology can offer a more personal and provocative definition of self, one which actively involves the wearer in a mutable aesthetic identity, replacing the fixed physicality of fashion with a constant flux of self-expression and playful psychological experience. The contribution of the research consists of: the integration of technology to alter communication in fashion, a recontextualisation of fashion within a wider arena of emotion and technology, the use of technologies from other disciplines to materialize ideas and broaden the application of those technologies, and the articulation of a fashion design methodology

Technology and the Internet: The Impending Destruction of Privacy by Betrayers, Grudgers, Snoops, Spammers, Corporations and the Media

This Article reviews how the Internet and related developments-technological, social, and legal-have magnified the threat to privacy posed by private individuals, commercial enterprises, and the media. It offers a brief overview of the current threats to privacy from sources other than the government, and, in particular, the impact of the Internet in creating or magnifying those threats. Part I discusses the threat to privacy in general, examining how the Internet and developments in surveillance technology, in information storage and retrieval, in dissemination of information, sound, and images, and changes to the informal social contract that defines general standards have all endangered privacy as we know it. Part II examines the advantages these developments give to individual betrayers, grudgers, and snoops, who seek to undermine the privacy of particular individuals, and to spammers, who do the same on a much broader scale. Part III reviews the ways in which corporate information gathering intrudes on privacy. Part IV looks at the role the media has played in exploiting and encouraging privacy threatening developments. The Article ends with a not-particularly-cheerful prognosis

THE HYBRONAUT AND THE UMWELT: WEARABLE TECHNOLOGY AS ARTISTIC STRATEGY

This dissertation explores the use of irony in networked wearable technology art as a strategy to emphasise the complexity of conjunction between techno-organic human and the techno-organic world. The research addresses the relationship between technologically enhanced human and networked hybrid environment, and speculates on the impact of technological enhancements to the subjective construction of Umwelt through ironic interventions. The project employs both artistic practice and critical theory. The practice-based part of the dissertation is comprised of three wearable technology artworks produced during the study. These concrete artefacts employ irony as a means to expose the techno-organic relationship between humans and their environment under scrutiny. The works highlight the significance of technological modifications of the human for the formation of subjective worldview in an everyday hybrid environment. The theoretical part navigates between the fields of art, design, technology, science and cultural studies concerning the impact of technology and networks on human experience and perception of the world. In the background of this research is biologist Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of the Umwelt, which is a subjective perception created by an organism through its active engagement with the everyday living environment. This dissertation focuses on the Umwelt that is formed in an interaction between hybrid environment and the technologically enhanced human, the Hybronaut. 4 Hybrid environment is a physical reality merged with technologically enabled virtual reality. The Hybronaut is an artistic strategy developed during the research based on four elements: wearable technology, network ability, irony and contextualised experience for the public. Irony is one of the prominent characteristics of the Hybronaut. Irony functions as a way to produce multiple paradoxical perspectives that enable a critical inquiry into our subjective construction of Umwelt. The research indicates that ironic networked wearable technology art presents an opportunity to re-examine our perception concerning the human and his environment