As a high school student in the 1970s, Mann was assembling helmets replete with computer circuitry, a display, and transmission capabilities. By 1991, he had brought his work in the area to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he would co-found the Wearable Computing Project and get his PhD. Mann is now on the faculty at the University of Toronto's department of electrical and computer engineering and is one of the four original organizers of the international symposium. On the second day of the conference, I asked him if he'd received an email message I'd sent. Mann paused in a characteristic way, as if he were perhaps reading some data from inside his smart goggles, before he explained that he hadn't. Welcome to the future.
Computation is secondary to something else.
That way you'd never, for example, miss a baby's first steps, because you'd have all the pictures taken all the time, and it would just sense these are important pictures and save them for you. I certainly don't recall it being in the lexicon at that time, when punched cards were still being used. My goal was to build a system for collaborative use. For example, to create an interactive process for creating pictures. To the best of my knowledge, I designed and built the first WearComp.