Dr.
Keith Clarkehttp://www.geog.ucsb.edu/~kclarke
kclarke@ncgia.ucsb.edu
805-893-7961 (voice)
Under the NSF-funded Digital Government Initiative Project Battuta (http://dg.statlab.iastate.edu/dg/ ) valuable experience has been gained about the design, construction and use of a wearable system that combines basic GIS functionality and augmented reality display to assist human navigation. A UCSB wearable system has been designed and built, and a prototype user interface for the system (GEORGE) coded and implemented in Java. In this presentation, the accomplishments and findings from Battuta will be summarized, and used to provide an informed view of the possible capabilities of future systems. To get to this future, key research obstacles must first be overcome, and some of these are cataloged and assessed. Central among them are asic human cognitive responses to navigation assistance, human-computer interface concerns, problems of cognitive overload and stress, and distraction problems similar to those for cellular telephones. While it remains to be proven that wearable computing, using today's technology, is superior to other types of navigational assistance, this will clearly not remain the case for very long. Probably the dominant theme in the near future will be the migration to a standard wearable platform based on commercial off-the-shelf technology melded with custom software for visualization.