EyeTap

Mann’s first EyeTap versions consisted of a backpack computer wired to a camera and viewfinder mounted on a helmet. The later optical design uses a beam splitter to send the same incoming light to both the user’s eye and a camera; the camera digitizes the scene, a computer processes it, and a display (the “aremac”) projects the augmented image back through the beam splitter. This creates what Mann calls “computer-mediated reality” or “augmented reality,” distinct from a conventional HUD because the computer can modify the real-world view in response to what it sees. Mann is widely cited as the “father of wearable computing” and coined sousveillance (personal, bottom-up recording) as a counterpoint to surveillance. In the mid-1990s he ran continuous personal-broadcast experiments that are considered early precursors to moblogging and lifelogging. He co-founded the International Symposium on Wearable Computers in 1997 and received the 2025 IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Technology Award for his work.

The exact year of the first EyeTap prototype is reported differently across sources (late 1970s vs. early 1980s); the consensus is that Mann was wearing homemade head-mounted camera/display systems while still in high school and continued refining them through the 1980s.

Mann has described feeling “nauseous, unsteady, naked” when removing the device after decades of use. In 2012 he reported being assaulted at a Paris McDonald’s because employees objected to his permanently attached EyeTap glasses.