wearable

If the idea of a heads-up display inside your eyeglasses still seems strange, what about one for your wristwatch?

A patent issued yesterday revealed a new frontier for the Google Glass project: the humble wrist. A wristwatch design filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office shows a timepiece with a clear touch screen that flips up from the base of the watch to serve as a secondary display.

Images filed with the patent show the display being used to offer directions, product information and e-mail notifications.

Patents don't always -- or even often -- become products. But … Read more

Princess Leia, eat your heart out.

If you need a little extra something in your struggle against the Galactic Empire, what better than this charming headdress? It's enough to stop a platoon of stormtroopers dead in its tracks.

But Blinklifier is no sci-fi film prop. It's the subject of research on feedback loops being presented at this month's 10th Asia Pacific Conference on Computer Human Interaction (APCHI 2012) in Matsue, Japan.

Tricia Flanagan of Hong Kong Baptist University and colleagues are proposing Blinklifier as a wearable computer that emphasizes the user's eye movements with a colorful … Read more

It's 2020 and you've a party to go to. What do you wear? If the techno-garments on display at the TechnoSensual exhibition in Vienna are any indication, you might strap on some backbreakingly high 3D-printed shoes and a dress that lights up when you blush, and top it all off with a feathered hat that reacts to medium-wave radio signals. (Or you could just go in jeans and your usual "I heart R2-D2" T-shirt, but what fun would that be?)

TechnoSensual -- which runs through September 2 at the MuseumsQuartier Wien art and culture center -- … Read more

It's always nice to encounter poetry in everyday life. But imagine wearing it -- literally. Lace Sensor Dresses by artists Anja Hertenberger and Meg Grant feature embroidered poems that are prerecorded and play aloud through tiny speakers sewn into the frocks.

Specific gestures trigger the poems to broadcast through the speakers, which are covered with decorative conductive lace custom-made with help from the Dutch Lace Factory Museum (and detachable in case something breaks or needs to be resoldered).

To play a poem about death and remembrance, for example, the wearer embraces herself by crossing her arms over her chest … Read more

Following Google's stunt-filled Google Glass demo, Apple is showing that it's also thinking about glasses, according to a patent granted today.

The patent application, filed on October 13, 2006, is for a wearable computing device that allows an image to be projected in a "head-mounted display apparatus." Sounds like cyborg status for sure.

The device will receive and process data to generate images on the display mounted in front of the user's eyes.

As The Next Web points out, the device's description indicates that the glasses would be less of a mobile display than … Read more

SEATTLE -- It was an unseasonably warm June evening, the kind of day locals rave about because they come so rarely. At 6 p.m., I hopped on my bike for an evening spin.

My heart-rate quickly raced up to 157 beats per minute as I picked up my pace to 14 miles per hour up a gradual rise in the road. At the same time, my blood-glucose level dropped to 62 milligrams per deciliter, low, but not dangerously so for a non-diabetic. All in all, pretty solid data, given that the night before I slept six hours and 21 minutes, waking for brief periods 21 times during the night.

Welcome to my cyborg life. Google has generated tons of press in recent days with its Project Glass, computerized glasses that lets users take pictures and find information. But it's hardly the only company pursuing wearable computing. And while Project Glass won't be commercially available for another two years at the earliest, there are plenty of companies selling devices that consumers can slip into and strap on to collect reams of data about their daily lives.

To get a glimpse of that future, I strapped on a bunch of those gadgets. Here's what I learned.… Read more

Here's a high-tech dress that's tailor-made for the red carpet.

Emily Steel, a student of industrial design, digital photography, and fashion at New Zealand's Victoria University of Wellington, has stitched together a garment using slide film, LEDs, and a LilyPad Arduino, a set of sewable electronic components. … Read more

A group of researchers says shoes may be the next thing in the busy field of wearable computers and gesture interfaces.

Computer scientists from the Telekom Innovation Laboratories, the University of Munich, and the University of Toronto this week published a paper on ShoeSense, a wearable computing system for a smartphone.

It's one of many gesture interface-related papers being presented this week at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2012) conference, which is sponsored by the research arms of Microsoft, Google, eBay, and other tech companies.

Wearable computing got a high-profile plug when Google introduced Project Glass, … Read more

Fitness technology is hot. Wearable technology is hot. It was just a matter of time before the two got together and had a love child. That baby is Move, a prototype technology garment that tracks your movements.

This isn't the first time we've checked out an imaginative tech fashion product from Jennifer Darmour of Electricfoxy. Her Zip jacket integrated a volume control into the zipper.

Built-in electronics in the tank top not only collect data with stretch-and-bend sensors, but also give a little physical nudge when your body position needs a correction. It's kind of like having somebody politely telling you not to slouch.… Read more