In the 2WEAR project we explore the concept of a personal system that is formed by putting together computing elements in an ad-hoc fashion using short-range radio. Certain elements are embedded into wearable objects, such as a wristwatch and small general-purpose compute/storage modules that can be attached to clothes or placed inside a wallet. Others have the form of more conventional portable computers, like PDAs and mobile phones. Also, there are stationary elements as part of the environment, some of which are visible, such as big screens and home appliances, while others are not directly perceivable by the user, such as network gateways and backend servers.

This setting deviates from the conventional computing paradigm in significant ways. What we usually refer to as the personal computer is a collection of physically separate and possibly autonomous elements that co-operate with each other without relying on external infrastructure or a pre-arranged setup. Various functions and applications are distributed on different platforms that can be widely heterogeneous in terms of computing resources and user interaction capability. In addition, the system configuration changes dynamically and several times during application execution due to devices being switched on and off, or moved into and out of range.

The 2WEAR project was started at January 2001 and was succesfully ended December 2003.