Intelligent Wearable Interfaces

PREFACE

When I was young, my favorite Chinese classic novel book was Outlaws of the Marsh (Shui Hu Zhuan). The story was about how 108 heroes banded together on a marsh-girt mountain in what today is Shandong Province in China, became leaders of an outlaw army of thousands, and fought brave and resourceful battles against pompous, heartless tyrants. The most interesting hero, in my mind, is the “Flyer on Grass” (Cao Shang Fei). With his “light body skill” (Qing Gong), he could walk on tree leaves, grass, and on water as if flying. Years later, I really had a chance to witness such martial art being performed by well-trained kung fu masters. One observation I made then was that the kung fu master could perform vertical jumps of a height many times that of his human body with the help of the tree leaves. However, he simply could not perform the acrobatic task while the leaves were not available. Then I started to think, as scientists, would it be possible for us to design and build tools or interfaces that allow humans to accomplish extremely difficult tasks that were impossible with no such interfaces? Would it be more realistic and convenient to develop such interfaces, instead of making robots, for assisting human beings to accomplish tasks otherwise impossible?

This book is a collection of such efforts we made in the Chinese University of Hong Kong. We call this research area Intelligent Wearable Interfaces. Namely, we would like to develop interfaces with a certain level of ...