The International Symposium on Wearable Computing was recently held in Seattle, with many attendees looking like cyborgs. They had "keyboards attached to their sleeves, tiny displays mounted to their glasses, and wires wrapped around their waists."
During the event, Olga Kharif discussed with Stefan Jung, senior scientist at Infineon Technologies, about wearable computers disguised as ordinary-looking clothing, like sports jackets for example.
Here are some short excerpts.
Q: How do the designs you offered at the show compare to what other companies are demonstrating here?
A: If you look at the people at the conference here, they wear special glasses, have lots of wires hanging off of them, have whole PCs wrapped around their belts. This is not what we're doing. We show that it's possible to implement very small, invisible computer chips into garments. Not for the virtual-reality applications that everyone at the conference is focused on but applications you might want to have in everyday life -- like an MP3 player.
Q: So the wires and the chips are part of your clothes, and they can be washed and bent. How does the technology work?
A: The fabric looks like and feels like regular fabric, and it is, in fact, polyester. To establish electrical connections, we integrate very thin copper wires -- you can't see or feel them -- into the fabric as it's being woven. The electronics itself -- for example, the MP3 player module, which is a very small circuit board, approximately 3 cm by 3 cm (1.18 square inches) -- is encapsulated in plastic. The conductive fabrics -- [the wires that are woven into fabric] -- come directly out of the module.
Here is what Infineon's wearable MP3 player looks like.
It has four units: a central audio module, a detachable battery and data-storage pack, an earphone and microphone module, and a flexible keyboard.
Even if this kind of clothes become available -- and affordable, I don't see myself as a potential customer, for at least two reasons:
- I don't like polyester -- in fact, I hate it: until Infineon use cotton, linen or wool, I will not try their *devices*.
- Having as many MP3 players as jackets is not very appealing: how would I remember to choose the one which has the right music for my mood on a specific day?
Source: Olga Kharif, BusinessWeek Online, October 16, 2002
5:48:17 PM Permalink
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