AwareFashion project provides cellphone alerts via clothing

Forget about WiFi finders that you have to carry, or MoSoSo tools that require you to constantly check your cellphone. Richard Etter, a researcher at the Fraunhofer Institute, has put together a design spec for something calls AwareFashion, or "clothes that sense your digital and social environment." The idea is that your shirt holds a chipset that can detect various signals, such as those from GSM phones or WiFi hotspots, and your cuffs will light up to indicate their presence. Of course, to really be effective as a social tool, the shirt would need to be able to interpret specific information, such as Caller ID and SMS streams from your cellphone. When that happens, we'll be ready to order a few, as long as we can throw them in the wash without destroying the whole system.

[Via textually.org]

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 19th 2005 1:38AM]

Then you could take it a step further... think Ambient Devices' orb, which uses LED's to display "passive" information - "information that is neither worthy of interrupt (push), nor worthy of investing time (pull). This type of information should be glanceable, like a clock or barometer." Imagine being able to look at your shirt cuffs and tell that your portfolio is doing well today, while the Nasdaq is tanking, based on the colors that your shirt cuffs are lit up as.
http://www.ambientdevices.com

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 19th 2005 1:38AM]

Just what I need. A shirt that shocks me when I go out in the rain.

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 19th 2005 1:38AM]

Is it just me or does this really look more like the world's nerdiest pocket protector?

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 19th 2005 1:38AM]

Hi Marc,

we are already working on extending AwareFashion with Bluetooth functionality and of course the clothes are washable ;-)

Richard
(AwareFashion)