The big hit of the wearables show…are MicroOptical's LCD eyeglasses, which contain a concealed electronic display in their frame. When you put them on, a beam of light shoots alongside the temple through the lens and then back into your eye, which perceives the reflected and folded light ray as a computer screen floating 3 feet in front of your face.

Wearables that let users input data or pinpoint their position are already becoming popular. Archaeologists or ecologists can map environments with unprecedented accuracy and ease, their hands staying free to work.

If you're looking for the latest trends in high-tech fashion, one place you'll want to be sure to check out is the Design for Manufacturing laboratory at Carnegie-Mellon University's Engineering Design Research Center in Pittsburgh. With the backing of some National Science Foundation funding, students there are hard at work pushing the leading edge in "wearable computers."

"The main purpose of wearables," says Daniel Siewiorek, director of the lab, "is to try to merge information space with people's work space." Although computing technology has evolved over the years from centralized mainframes to desktop PCs, Siewiorek points out that the fundamental input/output devices associated with computing haven't really evolved much beyond keyboards and monitors. "We want to break out of the standard input/output paradigm," says Siewiorek. "What people are looking for, effectively, is hands-off computing."