In the 1980s, people weren’t wearing head-mounted cameras, displays, or computers. Except for high school student Steve Mann, who regularly wore his homemade electronic computer vision system (seeing aid). Back then, Mann attracted stares, questions, suspicion, and sometimes hostility. But it didn’t stop him from refining the technology he developed. It now underlies augmented-reality eyeglasses—including those by Google and Magic Leap—that are used in operating rooms and industrial s...
