I think so -- there were other places doing this, too. The most interesting "in the wild" use of wearable computing was of course from UC Santa Cruz -- the Eudaemons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaemons) who built a roulette-defeating computer. Apparently Claude Shannon and Edward Thorp built something similar in 1960 too.
I worked for Steve Mann (I was an undergrad research assistant; more a learning experience than actually doing anything useful beyond sysadminning), who mainly did "painting with light" and other digital photography things, using his WearComp platform as a tool (he'd been developing it since the early 1980s). He also wore a 5W radio transmitter on his head (to get 56Kbps data back in the late 1990s). He's now at U of Toronto. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Mann)
Thad Starner (now at GA Tech) and Lenny Foner were probably doing the most useful general wearable computing work at the time. There were one-handed chording keyboards ("HandyKey Twiddler", the new version is http://www.handykey.com/), PC104 based embedded computers (now you'd just use a cellphone), and probably the top display device was from MicroOptics -- there was another headmount display which was cheaper but not as good, and it fully occluded one eye. Stuff ran linux, and it wasn't too hard to bring up QVGA X11 or an 80x24 console.
The thing I wanted to build, given the tech at the time, was a purely auditory wearable computer. Even in 2012, displays are kind of inadequate, but we have had viable portable audio sources (headphones) for decades. Combine that with sensors and some kind of ubiquitous camera (either mounted on the person, or just using environmental cameras as inputs), and you could do something pretty good.
I worked for Steve Mann (I was an undergrad research assistant; more a learning experience than actually doing anything useful beyond sysadminning), who mainly did "painting with light" and other digital photography things, using his WearComp platform as a tool (he'd been developing it since the early 1980s). He also wore a 5W radio transmitter on his head (to get 56Kbps data back in the late 1990s). He's now at U of Toronto. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Mann)
Thad Starner (now at GA Tech) and Lenny Foner were probably doing the most useful general wearable computing work at the time. There were one-handed chording keyboards ("HandyKey Twiddler", the new version is http://www.handykey.com/), PC104 based embedded computers (now you'd just use a cellphone), and probably the top display device was from MicroOptics -- there was another headmount display which was cheaper but not as good, and it fully occluded one eye. Stuff ran linux, and it wasn't too hard to bring up QVGA X11 or an 80x24 console.
The thing I wanted to build, given the tech at the time, was a purely auditory wearable computer. Even in 2012, displays are kind of inadequate, but we have had viable portable audio sources (headphones) for decades. Combine that with sensors and some kind of ubiquitous camera (either mounted on the person, or just using environmental cameras as inputs), and you could do something pretty good.