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University of Toronto professor Steve Mann has easily trumped anyone else's efforts in this regard, willingly exploring full-time life as a cyborg over the course of several years (and still doing so, as of this writing). Mann attempted to negotiate modern life gamely festooned with all manner of devices, including an "eyetap" that provided for the "continuous passive capture, recording, retrieval, and sharing" of anything that happened to pass through his field of vision.

It was difficult to imagine more than a very few people ever submitting to the awkwardness of all this, let alone the bother that went along with being a constant focus of attention; Mann himself was the subject of a notorious incident at the U.S.-Canada border, soon after the September 11th attacks, in which his mediating devices were forcibly removed by immigration authorities.*

* This sudden deprivation of the massive input he had become accustomed to was apparently a harrowing experience for Mann. He described it as one of deep disorientation and nausea.

But happily for all concerned, the hardware involved in wearable computing has become markedly smaller, lighter, and cheaper. As ordinary people grew more comfortable with digital technology, and researchers developed a little finesse in applying it to the body, it became clear that "wearable computing" need not conjure visions of cyberdork accessories like head-up displays. One obvious solution, once it became practical, was to diffuse networked functionality into something people are already in the habit of carrying on their person at most times: clothing.

In 1999 Philips Electronics published a glossy volume called New Nomads, featuring a whole collection of sleek and highly stylish fashions whose utility was amplified by onboard intelligence. While the work was speculative—all the pieces on display were, sadly, nonfunctional mockups and design studies—there was nothing in them that would have looked out of place on the sidewalks or ski slopes of the real world. Philips managed to demonstrate that wearable computing was not merely feasible, but potentially sexy.

Nor did the real world waste much time in catching up. Burton released an iPod-compatible snowboarding jacket called Amp in 2003, with narrow-gauge wiring threaded down the sleeves to a wrist-mounted control panel; by winter 2004-2005, Burton and Motorola were offering a Bluetooth-equipped suite of jacket and beanie that kept snowboarders wirelessly coupled to their phones and music players. The adidas_1 sneaker did still more with embedded processors, using sensors and actuators to adjust the shoe's profile in real time, in response to a runner's biomechanics.

Beyond the things you can already buy, hundreds of student projects have explored the possibilities of sensors light and flexible enough to be woven into clothing, typified by Richard Etter and Diana Grathwohl's AwareCuffs—sleeves that sense the digital environment and respond to the presence of an open Wi-Fi network. Given how often the ideas animating such projects have turned up in commercial products just a few years (or even months) later, we can expect the imminent appearance of a constellation of wearables.

And while none of these products and projects are as total as the digital exoskeleton Steve Mann envisioned, maybe they don't have to be. For all his personal bravery in pioneering wearable computing, Mann's vision was the product of a pre-Web, pre-cellular era in which computational resources were a lot scarcer than they are now. When more such resources are deployed in the world, we probably have to carry fewer of them around with us.

So what's the next step? After decades of habituation due to the wristwatch, the outer surface of the forearm is by now a "natural" and intuitive place to put readouts and controls. Meanwhile, with the generous expanse it offers, the torso offers wireless communication devices enough space for a particularly powerful and receptive antenna; a prototype from the U.S. Army's Natick Soldier Center integrates such an antenna into a vest