No shirt. No shoes. No augmented reality glasses. No service.
Human cyborg and University of Toronto Professor Steve Mann claims he was brutalized and kicked out of a Paris McDonald’s earlier this month after employees objected to his headset and its ability to record photos and videos of his experiences.
“I’m not sure why the perpetrators attacked, but ‘Perp. 1′ [Mann's name for one of his assailants] did mention about cameras not being allowed,” he told us in an exclusive email interview. Mann was unavailable for a phone call because his iPhone was also damaged in the alleged attack.
Though augmented reality headsets like Google’s Project Glass have just started making headlines this year, Mann has been wearing his own home-brewed “EyeTap Digital Glass” computers every day since the early 1980s. The current generation EyeTap, which runs on customized WearComp OS, captures images at 120 frames per second in 1,080x1,920-pixel resolution, but according to Mann, these images aren’t stored permanently.
“It merely delays rather than records, but when damaged (computer) the leftovers were recovered,” he said. “In this sense Perp 1 [the person who allegedly assaulted Mann] was the person who took all the pictures in the last hour or so, by causing the computer to be broken.”

'Some of the parts of me started shutting down at different times ... I’m still online now but a lot is not working.'
- Human cyborg (and University of Toronto Professor) Steve Mann

Mann, told us that, on July 1st, he, his wife and their two children were in line to purchase food at the Paris McDonald’s when an employee approached and informed them that cameras were not allowed in the establishment. After Mann presented the employee with a doctor’s note he carries with him that states he needs to wear his headgear, the employee let him through and a cashier took his order.

According to Mann, after he and his family had received their food and taken a seat by the entrance, another McDonald’s employee, whom Mann refers to as Perpetrator 1, approached and angrily tried to pull the EyeTap, which is permanently attached and cannot be removed without tools, off of his head.
“Perp. 1 reached his left hand out and pressed against the frame of my eyeglass, and swung his left hand around a few times pushing and pulling at it,” he told us.
Mann then tried to calm Perpetrator 1 and showed him his doctor’s note, which the employee showed to two coworkers, whom Mann nicknames Perpetrators 2 and 3. After Perpetrator 2 crumpled up his doctor’s note and Perpetrator 1 tore up some other documentation he provided, Perpetrator 1 then allegedly pushed him out the door and onto the street, damaging his gear.
“My Glass started acting a little erratic but I could still see to some degree, but with crosshatches and kind of a freeze-frame like motion as the Eye Glass stopped and started intermittently,” Mann said. The alleged assault apparently loosened a ribbon cable within the device, causing the eye piece to malfunction and flood Mann’s eye with laser light.
However, the device was still functioning until Mann had an embarrassing bodily reaction upon hitting the street, which caused his circuits to short out.
“The actual cause of the final stoppage (which happened shortly after he pushed me out the door) is a bit embarrassing as what happened also is that I had had to really use the toilet, at the time, and it was that I’d been going toward using the toilet but got attacked, so as a result, later, it turned out that my pants became the toilet,” he said.
“The cargo pants I wear have large number of pockets most of the way down both legs, so my iPhone and the processing boards, motherboard of miniature PC, control board of Glass, etc., went dead shortly afterwards, and that’s when the Glass went totally dark. My iPhone and some of the other pieces still don’t work.”
Mann said that, after picking himself up and dusting himself off, he sought out Police in the Champs-Elysees area, but none of the many cops he approached were interested in taking a report or investigating.

“Some of the parts of me started shutting down at different times afterwards,” Mann told us in an exclusive email interview. “I’m still online now but a lot is not working.”
To draw attention to his plight, Mann posted an account of the alleged assault on Blogspot on July 16, causing an international uproar. The incident has so far been covered by more than three dozen major news outlets. A group on Reddit had more than 200 comments as of this writing.

“After first trying with the Police (no luck) and then the Consulate/Embassies (no luck), and then the legal experts and human rights commissioners (no luck), some of whom suggested “the court of public opinion,” I finally brought this matter to the public’s attention, but only after exhausting all other possibilities,” he said.
A representative from McDonald’s told us that the company is still investigating the incident.

“We strive to provide a welcoming and enjoyable experience for our customers when they visit our restaurants,” the company told us in a statement. “We take the claims and feedback of our customers very seriously. We are in the process of gathering information about this situation and we ask for patience until all of the facts are known.”
For his part, Mann said he is not seeking punitive damages, just enough money to fix his EyeTap Glass and perhaps a commitment from McDonald’s to support vision research as his glasses are also designed to eventually help people with vision and memory problems.
No matter how this ends, Mann’s story raises serious questions about technology and privacy. As we carry cameras with us everywhere we go, the question of where and when we can capture our experiences looms large. In a paper on wearable computing, Mann describes wearable devices and recording as similar to human memory and says that public establishments like businesses should not discriminate against people whose memories are captured by computer devices. He sees a future in which everyone from memory-impaired Alzheimer’s patients to healthy adults uses wearable tech as an extended memory.

“The ‘Silicon Brain’ of the Mindmesh thus asks the question ‘is remembering recording?’ As more people embrace prosthetic minds, this distinction will disappear. Businesses and other organizations have a legal obligation not to discriminate, and will therefore not be able to prevent individuals from seeing and remembering, whether by natural biological or computational means,” he writes in Interaction Design


Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2012/07/17/world-first-human-cyborg-speaks-after-assault-in-paris-mcdonalds/?intcmp=obnetwork#ixzz20wAWQgmM

AduroT wrote:So does he actually need those for some reason or what's with the doctors note?

Aerethan wrote:I like the idea of having an every day HUD. But you know people would be out there looking at porn on them in public.

Ma55ter_fett wrote:
“They just have camera's duct-taped to their heads.”

Kovnik Obama wrote:

Ma55ter_fett wrote:
“They just have camera's duct-taped to their heads.”

Pretty much. And brain activity monitors, so, euh.. they know when there angry... or about to piss their pants? Not too sure what their going after, but I guess loads of useless data is better than no data...

And the premise that recording = memory is pretty ridiculous. Without emotional or cognitive baggage, an image is just that, an image, regardless of you having seen it before... I doubt Alzheimer victims would find usefull the knowledge that 'this is an image you've looked at before', if they simply can't feel anything about what they've felt about that image...

Aerethan wrote:recording is much more useful in every day life though. To be able to recall any image that you've seen in perfect detail is something that many people would want. It's a feature I wish I had back when I dated all those girls...

Kovnik Obama wrote:

Aerethan wrote:recording is much more useful in every day life though. To be able to recall any image that you've seen in perfect detail is something that many people would want. It's a feature I wish I had back when I dated all those girls...

As in much more usefull than memory? Hell no. Memory is larger than just 'event recalling', without it you'd never recognise anything about your surroundings. And recording is usefull, but it's not memory. A memory already has a value to the person who recalls it, the image recorded will be attributed one as you watch it. It's just two different things.

Here"s a Ted talk on spatial memory : http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/neil_burgess_how_your_brain_tells_you_where_you_are.html

Your brain maps every area your in in 6 different maps of grid-cells, which all records different factors : boundaries, orientation, lenght of time spent moving, etc, and compound all that information in one big 'feeling' of knowing (or not knowing) where you are and where your going, every single moment your awake.


Edit : also, if you REALLY want your mind blown, watch ''Gero Miesenboeck reengineers a brain''. The guy bio-engineered flies so that he could mind control them with radio-waves. Tru story, bro.

youbedead wrote:While their certainly is more to memory then just 'event recalling' the ability to associate those emotions and such with an event is the hard part. So don't think of it replacing memory with recording but simply a way to easily trigger those emotions in the same way that a photograph can trigger memories. So you still have normal memories with the added benefit of always being able to recall exact figures and data, the hardest thing to actually remember.

Kovnik Obama wrote:

youbedead wrote:While their certainly is more to memory then just 'event recalling' the ability to associate those emotions and such with an event is the hard part. So don't think of it replacing memory with recording but simply a way to easily trigger those emotions in the same way that a photograph can trigger memories. So you still have normal memories with the added benefit of always being able to recall exact figures and data, the hardest thing to actually remember.

Ah that's true. Basically would give everyone 'photographic memory'. That would be cool. The thing is, how would you sort through all that data without having to memorize specific dates, forms and other data to put in a query? The big advantage of memory is that it works intuitively and by approximation. You have a feeling, like Aerethan's feeling of sexual pleasure ( ), and then from there on, without anything more specific than that feeling, you start sorting through memories... and paff, one girl appears suddenly...

youbedead wrote:

Kovnik Obama wrote:

youbedead wrote:While their certainly is more to memory then just 'event recalling' the ability to associate those emotions and such with an event is the hard part. So don't think of it replacing memory with recording but simply a way to easily trigger those emotions in the same way that a photograph can trigger memories. So you still have normal memories with the added benefit of always being able to recall exact figures and data, the hardest thing to actually remember.

Ah that's true. Basically would give everyone 'photographic memory'. That would be cool. The thing is, how would you sort through all that data without having to memorize specific dates, forms and other data to put in a query? The big advantage of memory is that it works intuitively and by approximation. You have a feeling, like Aerethan's feeling of sexual pleasure ( ), and then from there on, without anything more specific than that feeling, you start sorting through memories... and paff, one girl appears suddenly...

Yeah that's kind of the issue, currently we can get a brain to interface with a computer and can actually view memorized scenes with computers as well, but we aren't quite at the level of communication required to do what I described. Thats coming in 20-30 years at most I'd imagine. Once we hit that point though, I can't even imagine what impact that would have on the world, and scoiety. Anyone would posses all the knowledge known to man.