Steve Mann, PhD (MIT '97), P.Eng. (Ontario), Fellow of the IEEE

Invented wearable computing in his childhood, brought this invention to MIT to found the MIT wearable computing project, and "persisted in his vision and ended up founding a new discipline." -- Nicholas Negroponte, MIT Media Lab Director, 1997 (link).

Invented, designed, and built the world's first smartglasses (smart eyeglass) for computer vision.

Inventor of the world's first contact lens display, and the first implantable eye camera.

Invented, designed, and built the world's first smartwatch in 1998 (patent filed 1999, featured on cover of Linux Journal July 2000) which he presented at IEEE ISSCC 2000 where he was named "The father of the wearable computer".

Inventor of HDR (High Dynamic Range) imaging, used in more than 2 billion smartphones. ("The first report of digitally combining multiple pictures of the same scene to improve dynamic range appears to be Mann 1993" -- Robertson etal, JEI 12(2).)

Inventor of the hydraulophone, world's first water-based musical instrument. It is also a new kind of physiotherapy device, as well as a new way of sensing water quality by sensing sound propagation in water.

Inventor of the the first digitally addressable strip of lights: SWIM (Sequential Wave Imprinting Machine) was the world's first eXtended Reality (X-Reality or XR) system. SWIM is an array of lights that can be waved back-and-forth to imprint images, text, graphics, and graphs onto human vision or photographic media. Many regard this as the predecessor of the metaverse, and the world's first spatial computer.

Founded companies with valuation in excess of $1 billion, together with students. (See http://wearcam.org/news/)

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