All the work we do around the TML has been guided also by "minimax" : maximum experiential impact, minimum perceived tech.
So in that spirit, I would urge finding a way to avoid following my friend Blair MacIntyre's route from GaTech with their backpack mounted cybergoggles for AR research (ARToolkit). That's way too tech-heavy for my taste, and besides so 2000 ;) Basically for softwear™ , my criterion is that the device must be as wearable as common jewelry and clothing accessories before I would consider it as a plausible body-based research platform.
What does that imply? Tetherless gear. No identifiable "computers" on the body. Can we see if there are wireless video goggles on the market or for loan? Another reason for audio instead of video. The strategy has been to do whatever processing that cannot be done in softwear off the body -- ie beam data off the body , to deliver media to the body using the simplest smallest devices. Anything more ambitious that requires more processing or encumbering gadget is moved off the body to conventional computers (ie Macs) or to room-based gear, e.g. spatialized audio from speaker array, which can be tres tres sophisticated.
Now having said that, I can relax temporarily on aesthetic/corporeal principles in order to get the experiment rolling so we can learn what we can in order to rough out some scenarios as quickly as possible, tethers be damned. But paying attention still to the phenomenological commitments being made by choice of sense modality and media transforms being considered. Then TMLabbers can reasonably and equably re-introduce aesthetic (which are actually ethico-aesthetic) working concerns ... :)
Cheers,
Xin Wei