Agents Of Gear; Military research: Turning out 007-like gadgets in Singapore.(Cover Story)

Byline: Alexandra A. Seno

Lee Shang Ping's radio is dead. So he jogs in place, jumps up and down, and the radio hidden in his camouflage suit springs to life, blaring Mandarin pop. It runs on energy generated when he steps on cells embedded in his running shoes, and by motion-sensitive canisters in his pockets. The hope is eventually to operate larger devices like mobile phones this way. Lee is a "human-power harvesting" engineer in Singapore's Mixed Reality Lab.

Mixed Reality is working on new ways of interacting with computers, ranging from wearable devices to a virtual war room that would allow officials to work online as if they were all in one place. Its director is a spiky-haired Australian, a postmodern match for James Bond's gadget man, Q. It is funded by the Defence Science & Technology Agency, Singapore's answer to DARPA, the secretive Pentagon research unit that helped spawn the Internet. The DSTA controls half the $5 billion defense budget, and sponsors hundreds of projects each year. It came to worldwide attention last year when its researchers took one day to customize a thermal scanner to detect travelers with high fever, helping to stem the spread of SARS.

DSTA projects are now attracting attention in both the commercial and military worlds. It's devised an air-conditioning ...