Yacov Sharir and Wei Yei, working on the Future Physical performance commission Intelligent City along with Sophia Lycouris and Stan Wijnans, gave a process demo at the WEAR-ME!! Network Exchange.

They started with some background: Sharir is Professor of Dance And Technology at the University of Texas, and Yei has collaborated with him for the past two years; previously he collaborated with a team of architects in Salt Lake City.

Sharir and Yei demonstrated three iterations of wearable computing suits which they have developed in the past two years. Sharir said: "Issues relating to human/virtual interactions have been around for a long time, but we have never mastered the technology." He moved on to show video footage from a project using the first wearable suit developed with Wei Yei, entitled The Automated Body Project. This featured the pair's cyber-suit: "Which collected data from the wearer, including EEG information, talked to a "mothership" and returned, via radio-frequency communications, an image representing the data. You could move your eyes and the image would move, or extend an arm and the image would extend - the images were projected on a transparent screen. A dataglove also let me manipulate that material in real-time."

The first iteration of the cyber-suit featured a large, rigid control pack on the front, and Sharir and Yei set about shrinking as much of its electronics into the actual suit as possible. Sharir demonstrated the second version of the suit operating in a performance entitled Lullaby: "For me, it was the first time I could create a situation with a slight relationship between a human and a cyber-human. By wearing the suit, I could activate different types of movements or phrases."

Wei Yei took over, to provide an insight into the technology behind the cyber-suit: "If this technology is going to integrate into daily lives, it must withstand being stepped on or chucked in the back of a rucksack. And it must have multiple levels of redundancy. It has to be washable and scrunchable - which meant that we would have to build every piece of the hardware and software."

"We started with the Cyberprint suit, which measured body responses." Sharir added: "We were interested in creating an alternative to a motion-capture suit, able to control a cyber-character from a distance wirelessly." Yei continued: "With the original version, wearers had to be upright. With Version 2, which we called Aurora, we stripped out the unnecessary elements - the laptop, USB chain and 802.11b wireless networking hardware. We designed a new controller, called Itchy: if a sensor failed, it would know, and as it calibrated the sensors it would know who was wearing the suit. We worked towards shrinking everything down; using Bluetooth for the network provided controllable sensor nodes."

"Itchy was then developed into Scratchy, which provided a six-degree-of-freedom inertial measurement unit. With our final Cybersuit prototype, called Shorty, you can pass data through the suit itself: the circuitry is inside the fabric, with mounting points for sensors. Our latest controller, called Gumdrop, has a radio transmitter and processor on a board measuring 2.8 by 1.5 cm, can be embedded in cloth and made waterproof, and is based on a Cirrus Logic ASIC chip which we designed ourselves."

Finally, it seems, Sharir and Yei are close to achieving their goal of controlling virtual characters by sensing dance movements in real-time, with the controlling dancers wearing a suit which is truly non-intrusive. Sharir gave a revealing quote: "I think the term wearable computing is a misnomer: I prefer the term performance augmentation" which shows the direction from which he and Yei are approaching. It will be fascinating to see their technology employed in Intelligent City.

Click here for images from this Process Demo....