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Wearable Technology Fashion Show
jlouderb writes "I know, it's been done before. But at the recent CTIA show I stumbled onto a wearable computing fashion show. It was weird. I had my camera and filched a copy of the show script. Combined together, you get a bizarre pastiche of scrawny models attempting to make phones, notebooks, video cameras and more into fashion statements. Just too surreal for words."
Semi-starved models flounced around the runway sporting mobile (and not so mobile) gear, accessories and smart clothing.
I realize that women have been getting into the geek market lately (with the iPod-mini, various games, etc) but man, I really don't see how this fashion show was giving me any inkling of how this stuff would look on ME.
90 pound models wearing sheer clothing and silver head gear, helmets, and carrying large backpacks isn't exactly what I think works.
Show me people dressed in t-shirt, jeans, and sneakers. Show me men/women dressed in business suits.
Fashion all too often seems like the opposite of tech.
Tech is all about having things that work (or ought to work). Form follows function, and the coolest things are the things that function best. Appearance is strictly secondary for any knowledgable user (which is probably the sticking point here).
Whereas fashion is all about things that are nonfunctional. The most fashionable things are the least practical ones, at least as far as the fashion pundits are concerned.
Doesn't surprise me that the fashion people are trying to add a fashion element to tech, though I can't help but think that its doomed. Form and function are too closely linked.
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"form follows function" is a central bauhaus tenet - I've got a bauhaus-styled watch and car, and you've probably seen these chairs. It is a fashion, it is functional, and in my eye, it's beautiful.
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The folks at the Eckert Mauchly Corporation in Philadelphia (makers of the UNIVAC computer) staged all kinds of stunts like this.
They once had a woman in a Maidenform bra pose next to the UNIVAC for the "You Never Know Where The Maidenform Lady will show up next" ad campaign.
Also many then famous celebrities posed with the UNIVAC like Angie Dickinson, Pat Boone, John Wayne and others.
Check out MVIS. I believe they had a few prototypes in the fashion show, but they are actually shipping wearable products for mechanics... cool!
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> Wearable computing is a technology that simply hasn't come to maturity yet. Things need to get smaller.
Things aren't mature for sure, but definitely developing. Looking around SFO (airport) I see people talking to the air with both hands free, people listening to music with both hands free (me), and people listening to ambient sounds through digital augmentation devices (hearing aids).Same goes for more visual stuff, although that now requires hands on. I see kids with portable DVD players, adults with laptops, incouding many logged in to the internet through wireless, PDAs, etc. In addition there are lots of folks using old-school devices to improve their vison; mine have weightless polycarbonate lenses.
Seems to me that integration of all of this into a body mounted central unit with some sort of HUD and audio should be fairly doable. Need more audio gain on the ambient sound or need to filter out the background noise to better hear the SO, just twiddle a virtual setting or two.
>Nonetheless, in 10 years you'll probably see it integrating into the lining of a designer series of jackets, sunglasses, and hats worn by every trendy highschool and college kid in the country.
Ten years ago, none of this with the exception of glasses and analoog hearing aids was common, now it's everywhere. Ten years from now, it'll be more than just school kids and trendoids.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Wearable tech has come a long way in the last few years, and I attribute it largely to the success of MP3 players like iPod, and the trend toward hands free cell phone attachments. I don't think wearing music earphones everywhere you go was really all that socially acceptable for a long time - sure when you were exercising or whatever it was fine, but it was rare to see someone just walking around a store with them on. And when I got my first cell phone a few years ago, I used an early earbud/boom mic combo almost exclusively out of both convenience and early fears of EM radiation. People made fun of me all the time for this! But now as I walk around the campus of a major university, half the thousands of undergrads I see everyday have their heads plugged in to one or the other. Now that it has become socially acceptable (dare i say - cool?) to adorn yourself with electronics, the move is really on to advance this market. Ideo may have jumped the gun a few years back with one of the first showcases of wearable tech, but they had the right idea.