Talk to the hand with a phone in a 3D-printed glove
Holding a phone means your hand is tied up -- unless you don Glove One, a glove with a phone in it that you make with a 3D printer.
Mobile phones: they're pretty handy, right? But holding one does mean your hand is tied up -- unless you don Glove One, a glove with a phone in it. Best of all, you can make it yourself.
Glove One is an art project by Milwaukee-based designer Bryan Cera. The numbers are on the fingers, so you dial and chat away by holding up thumb and little finger in the universal symbol for "call me".
It's made out of jointed bits of plastic, and here's the really clever part: you can print the plastic joints with a 3D printer to build your own gloved phone, making you look like Michael Jackson dialling out.
3D printing involves a machine like the Makerbot Thing-O-Matic building up layers of plastic to a set design to create your piece of kit. Press play on our video to see the Thing-O-Matic in action.
According to its designer, the five-fingered phone is "the literalization of Sherry Turkle's notion of technology as a 'phantom limb', in how we augment ourselves through an ambivalent reliance on it, as well as a celebration of the freedom we seek in our devices... While we enjoy the fantasies they offer, we rethink the technologies we construct and reflect on how they construct us." Quite.
I'd like to see a smart phone version with a screen in the palm for web browsing and watching HD movies. And how about pairing it with Nokia's magnetic tattoo that vibrates when you get a call to turn your body into a bionic blower?
Until then we'll stick with our Samsung Galaxy S3 and HTC One X -- at least until bionic eyeballs and Google brain implants come along.
Would you wear a glove with a phone in it, or are mobiles fine the way they are? Smell the glove in the comments or on our Facebook page.