On Sat, 23 Aug 2003 17:05:28 -0800
Alan Kay <Alan.Kay at squeakland.org> wrote:
> Hi Jecel --
> 
> At 8:22 PM -0300 8/23/03, Jecel Assumpcao Jr wrote:
> >On Saturday 23 August 2003 16:00, Alan Kay wrote:
> >>  [....]
> >>  There were two other basic forms for the Dynabook (which, after
> >> all,  is 95% a SW UI concept). One was that we thought there was a
> >>better  earlier chance for a display on a chip that could be
> >>introduced into  ordinary glasses to make a completely inobtrusive
> >>HMD.
> >
> >I would add user user's viewpoint camera to that, so the computer
> >could see more or less the same thing as the user. This would allow
> >very crude head tracking - at the very least you could keep virtual
> >objects aligned with real ones. The computer could see the user's
> >hand so that"touching" the virtual objects would
> >activate/drag/whatever them (there was an old Amiga demo of this, but
> >from a fixed viewpoint). A simple gesture could store anything that
> >the camera was seeing for future reference - a face, the page of a
> >magazine, etc.
> 
> This idea was in the notorious "Pendry Papers" that a bunch of us 
> wrote at PARC in 1971, and then used in the "The Knowledge Navigator" 
> "visionary video" that we did at Apple long ago. Dick Bolt (a 
> terrific UI designer who worked for Nicholas in the heyday of ArchMac 
> came up with many wonderful ways to use such a camera.

There's research on this going on today. See
http://www.wearcomp.org and http://www.eyetap.org/
They call it an eyetap.

-- 
Douglas