Thad Starner

Description

Thad Starner is founder and director of the Contextual Computing Group at the Georgia Institute of Technology's College of Computing. Before joining the Georgia Tech faculty in 1999, Starner gained international recognition as a leader in the field of wearable computing for his doctoral work on wearable computing and contextual awareness at the MIT Media Laboratory. He is a co-founder of the IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC) and a co-founder and first member of the MIT Wearable Computing Project. Starner has consulted for Fortune 500 companies and authored over fifty peer-reviewed papers and book chapters.

The Lizzy

Starner is perhaps best known as a strong proponent of wearable computing. An advocate of continuous-access, everyday-use systems, he wore his custom wearable computer in that manner from 1993 onward — one of the longest continuous experiments of its kind. He designed the hardware for his system, dubbed "The Lizzy," based on the wearable "hip PC" designed by Doug Platt, who built Starner's original machine. The system consisted of custom parts from a Park Enterprises kit, a Private Eye head-mounted display, and a Twiddler chorded keyboard.

In addition to augmenting the outside world, having a computer on at all times improved Starner's composure while giving talks; he has described having a speech impediment and being able to speak more clearly when prompted by the machine.

Research

• Wearable computing and contextual awareness. The founding argument of Starner's work is that a computer worn continuously can maintain a model of the user's situation — where they are, who they are with, what they are doing — and that this model, not raw processing power, is what makes a wearable useful.
• Text entry. Starner's group produced the definitive empirical studies of chorded text entry on the Twiddler, establishing that novices reach roughly 26 words per minute after about 400 minutes of practice and that experts substantially exceed the rates achievable on mobile keypads.
• Sign language recognition. Long-running work on automatic recognition of American Sign Language from wearable and camera-based sensing.
• Animal-computer interaction. The FIDO project on wearable interfaces for working dogs, allowing assistance and detection dogs to signal to handlers through bite sensors on a vest.
• Google Glass. Starner served as technical lead on the Google Glass project, bringing two decades of continuous-wear experience to a mass-market attempt at the same form factor — and to the public argument about social acceptability that followed.

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

Starner is the closest thing the field has to a long-term participant observer of its central claim. Wearing a computer continuously since 1993 makes him a single-subject longitudinal study in what happens when a machine becomes a permanent part of a person's cognitive and social equipment — including the parts nobody designs for: how others react, what the device does to conversation, and what its absence feels like.

Related Reading

• Mobile Text Entry
• Wearable Computing
• Simulation and Augmentation: Issues of Wearable Computers
• Sandy Pentland
• Cyborg Animals
• Media Lab at MIT