Miniature electronics and and global supply chains have us on the cusp of a new era of human experience. Early forms of wearable computing focused on augmenting the human ability to compute freely. As pioneer Steve Mann and calm technology pioneer Mark Weiser wanted, “to free the human to not act as a machine”. What does this mean for us as designers and developers, and how can we build interfaces for the next generation of devices?

Who was here before us, and how can we best learn from them? These are the machines that will be a part of our lives in only a few years from now, and the best way to learn about the future is to dig into the past. This talk will focus on trends in wearable computing and VR as it developed from the 1960s to now, and then into the future. This talk will cover various topics on the history and future of wearables. We'll learn about Ivan Sutherland, human augmentation, infrastructure, machine vision, processing, distributed computing and wireless data transfer, a church dedicated to VR, computer backpacks, heads up displays, reality editing, job simulators and unexplored realms of experience that haven't yet come to life. We'll also learn about the road from virtual reality to augmented reality and what we need to build to get there. This talk is for anyone interested in how we can add a new layer of interactivity to our world and how we can take the next steps to get there.

Our world is made of information that competes for our attention. What is needed? What is not? We cannot interact with our everyday life in the same way we interact with a desktop computer. The terms calm computing and calm technology were coined in 1995 by PARC Researchers Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown in reaction to the increasing complexities that information technologies were creating. Calm technology describes a state of technological maturity where a user’s primary task is not computing, but being human. The idea behind Calm Technology is to have smarter people, not things. Technology shouldn’t require all of our attention, just some of it, and only when necessary.

How can our devices take advantage of location, proximity and haptics to help improve our lives instead of get in the way? How can designers can make apps “ambient” while respecting privacy and security? This talk will cover how to use principles of Calm Technology to design the next generation of connected devices. We’ll look at notification styles, compressing information into other senses, and designing for the least amount of cognitive overhead.