Thad Starner , Brad Rhodes , Brian Clarkson , and Alex Pentland

For most computer systems, even virtual reality systems, sensing techniques are a means of getting input directly from the user. However, wearable sensors and computers offer a unique opportunity to redirect sensing technology toward recovering more general user context. Wearable computers have the potential to “see” as the user sees, “hear” as the user hears, and experience the life of the user in a “first-person” sense. This increase in contextual and user information may lead to more intelligent and fluid interfaces that use the physical world as part of the interface. Wearable computers are excellent platforms for contextually aware applications, but these applications are also necessary to use wearables to their fullest. Wearables are more than just highly portable computers; they perform useful work even while the wearer isn’t directly interacting with the system. In such environments the user needs to concentrate on his or her environment, not on the computer interface, so the wearable needs to