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MIThril Jacket Showcases Wearable Computing
Codeine writes "The Seventh Annual International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC), to be held later this month, will again feature members of MIT's Media Lab showing off the group's MIThril jacket. Taking its name from J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy, the jacket combines body-worn computation, sensing, and networking in a clothing-integrated design, according to the project." According to a new paper (PDF link) to be presented at the conference, the latest version of this long-evolving system uses a Sharp Zaurus running Linux.
I can see some useful embedded applications (excuse the pun, ho ho) in having portable computing power, but look at the photo - the weight of it all. I'll wait till they get it a bit more slimline. Reminds me of 80s "mobile" phones compared to today. Why's it all so cumbersome? ok, batteries I understand we still have to work on, but the rest?
Integration is all good, but as for integrating functions into clothing I believe it can be at the expense of flexibility. I would much rather have a lot of functions integrated in my mobile, and be able to bring those functions with me in situations that I might choose another attire.
On the other hand, as computers get smaller and cheaper, eventually the kind of functionality people would want embedded into their clothing could be put into tons of different things.
Think RFID tags -- when the price gets low enough, why not embed it into everything? All you would need is a central repository which you could snap into place, or have your shirt/jacket/sarong/whatever pick up the info wirelessly.
Combine this with "paper" displays and you might eventually be able to check your schedule on your shirt sleeve, update it, and wirelessly transmit the changes to a server where it gets distributed to people who have subscribed to your calendar.
Presently, you're right. It's far too bulky to be considered for anyone but die-hard geeks. Similar to someone hundreds of years ago considering lugging around a grandfather clock on their wrist. Or thinking of carrying a phone in your pocket thirty years ago. Eventually, it becomes cheap enough and small enough where it makes sense.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
You didnt put my jacket in the wash.. er.. did you?
I think you're onto something here. What do you do when your wearable computer starts to stink? You can't put it in the washing machine. I doubt it's dry-cleanable...
Have anyone of you thought of going into music store, asking if you could test if a cd played properly in your "portable cd-player" (external cd-rom drive connected to the laptop in his backpack..) and rip it while chatting away with salesman how RIAA is doing the right thing and how you at least support them all the way.. heh heh
Preserve old classics: copy your collection onto all hard drives.
There's been a few comments about how the whole wearable computing thing is silly, and "it's an MIT" thing. Let me clear this up a bit. Maybe it started as an MIT thing way back in the late 50's/early 60's, at least according to this paper. But I know Carnegie Mellon has been working on this stuff for over 5 years because they had ongoing wearable computer projects when I was a freshman there in 98'. And there's a lot of others besides MIT and CMU working on this stuff, just look here under the Organizations section.
This area of technology is already being targeted at consumers. Try to have a little imagination and realize how powerful this technology could be. For example, what if you had a little speech translator that fit in your ear, recognized nearby spoken speech in foreign languages, traslated it to your language, and used a voice synthesizer to repeat it back to you in your native tongue. Just wait a few years and you'll be saying "damn, I need one of those".
If they could produce a classy Linux skirt I'd definitely use it!
Make clothing that cleans itself.
Make clothing that dries itself.
Make clothing that automatically reacts to the weather etc.
But putting a computer in your clothing, just doesn't make sense!
Technology should be intelligent, useable, and not make you look like a freak while using it (Bluetooth wireless headsets come to mind).
-- "To ask a question is to show ignorance; Not to ask a question means you'll remain ignorant."