The MIT roots of Google Glass, the wearable information display

Thad Starner, 24, Somerville

OCCUPATION: Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate student in media arts & sciences

HOBBIES: "Augmenting humans" with computers

FAVORITE MUSIC: The Rez Band, a Chicago "hard-rock band"

LAST VACATION: In Australia, to deliver a paper on handwriting recognition

TRANSPORTATION: Rides the T

HARDWARE IN HIS OFFICE: Silicon Graphics workstation linked to the MIT Media Lab net

HARDWARE EVERYWHERE ELSE: Starner's own "wearable computer." Display by Reflection Technology of Waltham; one-handed keyboard by HandyKey of Mt. Sinai, N.Y.; central unit by Park Engineering of Spokane, Wash.

USE OF TECHNOLOGY AT WORK: With a small computer display glued to one eye of his goggles, Starner walks about like a one-eyed cyborg -- half man, half machine and wholly unnerving to those who have not seen him before.

The eye display is attached by wire to a small computer on his belt. Another wire leads from the computer to the one-handed keyboard that Starner uses to keep running notes on a conversation (he claims to type 50 words per minute with it) or to search his files for a relevant tidbit.

Before talking to a reporter, Starner flips a switch to turn off the wearable computer. "I do that and half my brain is not here," he says. "It's not that I've lost what I have in my head. It's that this gives me so much more power." He claims to wear his invention nearly full-time when it is working -- in the office, at lunch and while walking around the campus of MIT.

For now, Starner claims the computer gives him "augmented memory." Talk to him of anything from technical subjects to Chinese food, and he will call up relevent notes from his computer. When a cellular phone is attached to the wearable computer, Starner says, a colleague can send an Internet message right to his eye, via the workstation in his office.

Starner says the eye display one day will be replaced by a tiny projector that flashes computer images into the goggles or eyeglasses. That will allow a doctor to superimpose a computer image of a chest over a live patient. A repairman at a remote site could ask his home base to project a template of a machine right into his glasses. Starner calls it "augmented reality."

GREATEST TECHNOLOGY DISASTER: "I thought I killed a supercomputer." While flipping a switch inside a Thinking Machines computer, "my screwdriver slipped and scraped across the pins of the chips . . . It went down, but the next morning it was up again."

ADVICE FOR FIRST-TIME USER: "Don't assume that IBM PCs and Macs are all there are in the world."