Current Design Goals: Rev. 1 Headset

The basic headset is one of three parts of the wearable system I'm currently working on. It must be able to be constructed from consumer-available parts for not more than $100, and must be capable of the following:

• Presenting visual information to the user, including legible text and a usable computer interface
  
• Collect audio signals from the user's environment, ideally as a near-approximation of user's natural hearing
• Collect video of the user's environment, and present that information to host computer system
  
• Connecting to a modern computer system via a VGA port or Svideo port
• Be powered for not less than 10 hours of usage on a battery pack, or readily powered off host computer, i.e. USB
• Present audio to the user, as furnished by the audio mixer portion of the wearable system

I'm also working on the input devices and audio mixer, they will be posted later.

Audio design

So, my focus for design at this point is focusing on mediation/augmentation of two senses - sight and hearing. I'm waiting for the opportunity to buy more head-mounted displays to experiment with, so in the meantime a large part of my work is going to focus on audio. I've been considering the merits of different designs, and there are different merits to each.

The audio setup needs to combine the audio outputs of carried radios, the wearable computer itself, and worn microphones. My goal for it is to have a central mixer that can combine the signals, adjust their volume relative to each other, allow them to be adjusted to the left or right channel or any combination thereof, and feed signals from one device into another. For now it seems prudent to build one that's controlled manually, but I'd eventually like there to be a simple method of computer control.

Hopefully the first of many.

Alright. Certain benefactors who I'm not sure want to be named publicly have seen fit to bestow funding upon me. This means that for a while here, I'll have plenty of money to research wearable computing and explore new ideas and methods of facilitating human thought. I have already spent a portion of the funds on hardware to experiment with, but there is more than enough left to provide for a lot of experimentation.

This blog is being set up, along with a Glogger account, to manage the work I do in this area. I'm also intending to repurpouse my twitter account to accomodate mobile communications. I also intend for all of these to be used to provide relevant commentary from those who are interested in this sort of work.