Preliminary Investigations into the Use of Wearable Computers

In this paper, we investigate human factors which could have a bearing on the use of wearable computers. The first study examines performance on a reaction time task using a head-mounted display in comparison with performance on a sVGA visual display unit. While the number of missed targets was not significantly different, there were significant differences in reaction time to displays. The second study shows performance time of participants using a wearable computer to be superior to those using paper-based manual and recording, but there is a trend for more errors to be made when using the wearable computer.