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.

Comments

Mithril?

[ComaVN]

I'm guessing all it has in common with the Tolkien metal is it's price.

Re:Mithril?

[gl4ss]

i dunno, all that hardware might protect you from stabbing as well!

(geez, just look at the pic)

Don't know if I would "wear" computing

[Arciryon]

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.

Re:Don't know if I would "wear" computing

[nacturation]

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.

Good-bye pocket protectors...

[mcpkaaos]

Because nothing says, "Please kick my ass," quite like wearing your computer.

Re: Good-bye pocket protectors...

[Black Parrot]

> Because nothing says, "Please kick my ass," quite like wearing your computer.

Mithril Robe of *Geekiness* [2,-25]. +1 to intelligence, -5 to charisma. Aggravates nearby jocks and cheerleaders; provides immunity against getting laid. Activates every 50+d50 turns for spellchecking. This item is heavily cursed. If warn while riding a Segway, may polymorph your character into a dork.

MIT's dumb idea??

[Porthwhanker]

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".

Re:Would you want this?

[Lumpy]

so you would rather have to dig out your cellphone and dial from it instead of having you cellphone as a device on your belt and you simply say "dial steve at office" to dial steve's office number and then talk to him through the bluetooth headset?

what you want is EXACTLY a wearable computer. just make the "cellphone" a black box with no buttons or silly microphone + speaker, oh and give it a decent processor, ram, storage, etc...

nahh give me a wearable computer with a cellphone attachment.. think pcmcia card here...

90% of the hardware you see is power and battery management. and that is the biggest problem. batteries today are a complete and utter joke compared to everything else... almost no power and life for a gigantic size.

wearable computing is very cool, I used to be faster at typing on my handykey twiddler one handed keyboard than a regular keyboard. do I still do the wearable computing thing??? nope. but I'm not in college anymore with thousands of hours to spend on my projects (or get credit and funding for my projects!)

but wearable computing is going that way... It's that you call it a cellphone and think of the phone as the central piece where as the "phone" really is a small accessory to the main computer.

the thing holding it back is dirt cheap bluetooth and batteries that dont royally suck.