wearable

Your hoodie just updated your Facebook page

Sure, you can "poke" a friend or "like" a status via your mobile phone. But that's sooo last season.

Ping, a "social-networking garment" from Seattle-based user experience designer Jennifer Darmour, is a concept hoodie that links to your Facebook account wirelessly and lets you connect to your minions by performing basic gestures.

Take off the hood, and you poke a friend. Tie the waist bow to accept a friend request. What's that? A vibration on your shoulder? You just received a new notification.

Darmour, the brain behind Ping and the site electricfoxy, … Read more

Weather dresses go where the wind blows

Not that you need your clothes to tell you what the weather's like outside, but a climate-reflecting garment still counts as a rather cool (or hot as the case may be) idea.

Contributing to the ever-growing field of wearable technology, Montreal-based digital media artist Valerie Lamontagne came up with a series of dresses that wirelessly transmit data like temperature, wind speed, humidity, and rainfall back to the garment. Custom-built circuitboards receive the information and relay it to the clothing's internal circuitry to affect real-time changes in keeping with the natural environment.

The gold, yellow, and brown Sun Dress, … Read more

Golden-i turns wearer into a cyborg, sort of

It's not a ripoff of GoldenEye in the James Bond series, but the Golden-i could have been something to emerge from the gadget labs of Q.

Spotted at the recently concluded Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, the Golden-i wireless Bluetooth/Wi-Fi headset is meant for users who usually have both hands busy but still need computer access. The entire system, which projects a 15-inch virtual display, is also voice-controlled, so you simply say the corresponding text on the icons to activate a PC's data and applications.

The software, supplied by speech solutions provider Nuance, is intelligent enough … Read more

Crave giveaway of the week: Vuzix AV310 wearable display

Here we go again with another installment of the Crave Giveaway of the Week. This week's gadget: The Vuzix AV310 wearable display.

How's it work? Well, you connect your iPod, iPhone, or portable DVD player to it with the included cable, strap this puppy on, and your small video screen is magically transformed into a large, 16:9, wide-screen home theater with a virtual 52-inch display (as seen from 9 feet). It may not have the highest resolution (read: the screen isn't supersharp), but there's a certain novelty to the whole apparatus--and it's sure to … Read more

Wearable, workout-worthy W-Series Walkman

There's more than one way to make a wireless MP3 player, and building it directly into a set of headphones may seem like the easy way out, but it gets the job done. Plus, there are none of those audio-fidelity issues you might run into with technologies such as RF and Bluetooth, which is probably why Sony elected to take this route with its new W-Series Walkman.

This 2GB MP3 player is built into a set of impressively small earbud-style headphones and sports a palatable price tag of just $69.

Read the Sony W-Series Walkman review.

Wrist-worn computer packs beaucoup functions

With the Zypad WR1100, we're getting closer to "beam me up," at least in looks, if not in actual transporter compatibility.

This bit of bling is a ruggerized wrist-worn personal computer designed for the bush. It contains a high performance CPU with 128MB of flash memory and 256MB of RAM.

With the Zypad device, which runs a Linux operating system, one can access a remote host system through integrated wired or wireless interfaces. The unit boasts a special fiberglass-reinforced nylon-magnesium alloy case for maximum durability and minimum weight.

Features include "802.11 and Bluetooth/Zigbee interfaces, … Read more

Methanol fuel cells the latest in portable power

A German company has introduced a "wearable" fuel cell that uses direct methanol fuel cell technology, doing away with the weighty mechanical components usually associated with generation of electrical power.

Based on an award-winning unipolar stack technology design, the Jenny 600S delivers 25 watts of power for up to 20 hours at a time, according to the company Smart Fuel Cell (SFC).

SFC fuel cells took top honors in the U.S. Department of Defense's Wearable Power Competition last October against stiff competition from a host of big-name competitors. But it's not the only game: companies … Read more

Artist envisions turning fake eye into bionic eye-cam

Three years after losing her left eye in a car accident, San Franciscan Tanya Vlach wants to make her artificial eye more useful: She's planning to put a video camera in her eye socket with the goal of having a bionic eye.

Asked in an e-mail what her inspiration is, Vlach wrote:

The Bionic Woman and maybe Bladerunner! Ever since I lost my eye I would fantasize about having a bionic eye. So I did research and I realized that as technology becomes increasingly smaller it seemed doable to engineer a miniature video camera small enough to put inside … Read more

Hey, answer your ski glove, already!

If you're snowboarding and your wrist starts to vibrate, let's hope it's an incoming call on your g.cell glove and not a muscle spasm caused by that run-in with a tree you just had.

Swany's g.cell incorporates a fully integrated Bluetooth-adaptable cell phone in an insulated water-repellent glove for skiing, snowboarding, and other winter sports.

As mentioned above, incoming calls announce themselves via vibrating wrist action, and you push a button on the back of your hand to answer. A voice-command dial system lets you call out, with a speaker and listening device integrated … Read more