[vimeo url=”http://vimeo.com/96047923″]
This is what you get when two NYU graduate students decide to get experimental with clothing and technology: a hoody that is capable of communicating with other people who are operating smartphones. The thing is that you won’t be using this garment to do any typing yourself, a series of innocuous gestures, like pushing up a sleeve or adjusting the hood, are enough to broadcast some pre-defined messages to those who need to be contacted.
The intelligent upper-body wear was made using a hoody (of course), a cellular-capable Arduino board that fits at the back between the wearer’s shoulderblades and a selection of switches to send messages. The end result has about the same functionality as those pre-set messages you have programmed into your phone but the experiment itself has a lot of potential for future applications.
Creators Rucha Patwardhan and Alina Balean posit that applications of a garment like this could see it becoming “…a safety device for individuals traveling along, children or others (CIA anyone) that need to communicate discreetly”
Just to be clear, you won’t be finding this in stores are any point and even if you did, actually cleaning it would probably be a nightmare. But a bit of a budget and a larger development instead of off-the-shelf parts would probably take care of that problem.
Source: Alina Balean via Engadget