From...

December 27, 1999
Web posted at: 10:19 a.m. EST (1519 GMT)

by Curtis Franklin

(IDG) -- What are you wearing New Year's Eve? If you're truly wired you might tuck a pager, mobile phone, and personal digital assistant into your cummerbund. But even the most techno-savvy probably won't be carrying a PC to the party--this year, anyway. But in a few years, you might pack your PC just as easily as you tote around your Walkman, if companies like Xybernaut and IBM have their way.

IBM has begun a pilot program to place small wearable PCs into test situations to find out whether customers want the very personal computers, and whether IBM wants to join Xybernaut in selling them.

People are interested, but so far much of the interest has come from the business sector. Most of the requests have focused on expensive, technical tasks in which mobility translates to money.

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"General Electric is using it in the subsidiary that makes generators. [The company wants] to put manuals online and make them available at the point of use. If you can let a technician high on a ladder behind a generator stay there rather than coming down to a desk to look at a CD-ROM, it translates to more money," explains Bruce Knaach, manager of licensing and solutions for IBM's personal systems group. He is in charge of the pilot program, working with companies that have come to the company requesting a wearable computing solution.

Sanko, a Japanese consulting firm that specializes in work for utility companies, is another pilot customer looking to streamline its operations. Sanko has "a division using process automation software to keep track of who's done what to which equipment. They want to put those applications and that data on the wearable [PC] so it's available at the equipment itself," Knaach says

The pilot customers all seek an application that is easy to cost justify. "They want to be able to measure the gains and know whether it's a good technology investment," Knaach explains.

He points to maintenance applications, medical solutions--especially used during surgery or patient rounds--and large-scale manufacturing applications as areas that can produce the sort of easily measurable returns that attract corporate interest. Still, why is IBM following Xybernaut in looking for customers exclusively in the institutional and corporate markets? Why not trot out wearable PCs for the masses at the next Consumer Electronics Show?

Knaach says that the units are still expensive; but that's only part of the reason. "Wearing a computer isn't a socially acceptable thing," he says, explaining, "You look like a soldier wearing half a helmet--like a techno-geek." People tend to react poorly because, he says, "You really look kind of Borg-ish. That forces it [the devices] into environments where people either don't care what they look like or have it as a condition of employment." However, Knaach thinks that private individuals will begin to rely on wearable PCs over the next three or four years.

"Merging technologies will move wearable PCs to more people. Where today people might carry a cell phone, pager, PDA, and a laptop computer, as they merge, people will want to carry one item instead four," Knaach says.

And where function leaves off, fashion can take over in moving wearable computers into the broad market. "At some point," Knaach predicts, "It will end up like the first Walkman. The first time you saw one it was strange, but then they became cool."