Love Those Wearables!(wearable computers)(Brief Article)

Thad Starner first started wearing his computer in 1993. He would strap a shoe box of electronics to his waist and a small keyboard to his wrist and don a bulky headset with a small display monitor suspended in front of his left eye. After a while the other students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology stopped gawking and accepted him as just another nerd. Nowadays, however, Starner is looking much more fashionable. He's a professor at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, for one thing, and his wearable computer looks just like a pair of ordinary black-rimmed glasses--except for the thumb-size gadget on the frame that beams a tiny, bright image onto the lens. "The goal," says Starner, "is to have the computer disappear into your clothes so that no one knows you have it."

Starner is a living history of wearable computers. What used to be clunky contraptions only a nerd could love have now gotten closer than they've ever been to disappearing into your clothes. High-tech companies such as IBM and Philips, and also clothing firms such as Levi Strauss and Nike, are putting miniature computers into everything from wristwatches to running shoes. These are not stand-alone devices: they're linked to each other and wirelessly to the Internet.

Many high-tech firms were testing the waters at last week's CeBIT, the giant technology trade fair in Hanover, Germany. IBM showed wearable computer peripherals such as a silver necklace with a hidden microphone, a woman's display watch, earrings with speakers, and a ring whose elegant turquoise stone doubles as a nifty scroll-point mouse. Equipped with tiny, wireless Bluetooth transmitters, these are unobtrusive interfaces for a computer or a phone. "If you have something with you all the time, you might as well be able to wear it," says Cameron Miner, lead scientist at IBM's design lab in San Jose, California.

IBM isn't saying when products will come out. But Philips and partner Levi Strauss, the bluejeans maker, are bringing out a summer collection of "wearable electronic garments"--jackets with a GSM mobile and an MP3 player in special pockets, with a remote control on the front flap of the jacket and a microphone in the collar. The wires are sewn in. The two devices work together, with the music turning off when you talk on the phone. (The winter collection, available only in Europe, has already sold out.) Hitachi confirmed it was bringing out a wearable, wireless Internet device in Japan this summer with a lightweight Shimadzu ...