He is the inventor of the hydraulophone, a public water feature that is a fun and playful musical instrument similar to a woodwind instrument but using pressurized water instead of air. He is also a sculptor who builds hydraulophones as public art installations around the world.
He has been featured by news organizations including AP News, New York Times, LA-Times, Time, Newsweek, Fortune, WiReD, NBC, ABC, CNN, David Letterman (#6 on Letterman's Top Ten), CBC-TV, CBS, Scientific American, Scientific American Frontiers, Discovery Channel, Byte, Reuters, New Scientist, Rolling Stone, and BBC. Thousands of articles about him have appeared worldwide in many languages.
His award winning documentary cyborglog ShootingBack, and the ideas from his recent book "CYBORG: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer" (Randomhouse Doubleday, 2001) inspired a 35mm feature length motion picture film about his life (http://wearcam.org/cyberman.htm), said, by P.O.V., to be Canada's most important film of the year.
Together with his students James Fung and Chris Aimone, as well as neurologist Ariel Garten, Mann founded InteraXon, a Canadian company that is currently commercializing the cyborg technology developed by Mann, Fung, and Aimone. InteraXon created a large-scale public art installation open to the public as the flagship project of the Ontario Pavillion during the entire time of the Olympics from February 12-28, 2010.
Mann was the inventor of, and one of the 4 people that developed the EyeBorg camera, named one of the 50 best inventions of the year by TIME.
Mann has written more than 200 research publications, books, and patent publications, and has been the keynote speaker at more than 25 scholarly and industry symposia and conferences and has also been an invited speaker at more than 50 university Distinguished Lecture Series and colloquia. His work has been shown in numerous galleries and musems around the world, including the Smithsonian Institute, National Museum of American History, The Science Museum (Wellcome Wing, opening with Her Majesty The Queen June 2000), Museum of Modern Art (MoMA in New York), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Triennale di Milano, Austin Museum of Art, and San Francisco Art Institute.
He also won first place in the Coram International Sustainable Design Award for his interactive water feature, and is the recipient of the 2004 Leonardo Award for Excellence.