14 DAY TRIAL // Apple has reportedly hired a certain Richard DeVaul, whose Linkedin status changed last month from Founder & President of AWare Technologies to Senior Prototype Engineer at Apple, Inc., according to a report by Computerworld. The site touts the move as a significant one for the Mac maker, suggesting Apple is getting even more focused on the mobile computing front.
Computerworld cites DeVaul’s personal home page and is informing that he has a background in wearable technologies. He has a PhD. in Media Arts & Sciences from MIT, where he worked on “new human-computer interaction techniques for wearable, mobile, and portable applications.”
His dissertation was on “The Memory Glasses,” a heads-up display focused on the problems associated with wearable memory support technology, which DeVaul summarizes as follows: “The short version is that I can improve your performance on a memory recall task by a factor of about 63% without distracting you, in fact without you being aware that I'm doing anything at all. Even more interesting is that giving you wrong information subliminally doesn't seem to mess you up.”
A founding organizer and leader of the MIThril wearable computing project, DeVaul later founded AWare Technologies. His work there is also summarized in a few lines, with DeVaul writing, “We began in early 2004 as a contract research company providing customized high-performance personnel monitoring for the US Army, DARPA, and Olympic sport organizations. Since 2006 the company has refocused to deliver effective behavior-change solutions for increasing fitness. We also have one of the most popular health-and-fitness iPhone apps, StepTrakLite.”
Finally, Computerworld points out to one of the guy’s personal inventions – the “Distributed multi-nodal voice/data communication,” which “comprises systems and methods of creating and maintaining a communications network [and] includes a wearable system, a deployable system, an array of physiological sensors, an array of environmental sensors, and the integration of these into a multi-nodal voice and data communication system.”
It is unclear what exactly DeVaul will be working on at Apple, even though the Cupertino tech giant is known to have published several patents for fitness-aimed systems, as well as multiple patented wearable display technologies. What Computerworld seems to know for a fact is that, “DeVaul will be working under Jonny Ive in a secret lab focused on wearable computing technology where only seven people besides Ive and CEO Steve Jobs know what he is doing.”