Smart Hoodie: The cellphone sweater #WearableWednesday
Two grad students at NYU’s ITP program have developed this awesome “smart hoodie”. Check out more on their site.
Have you ever wondered what the future of a mobile interfaces could be? What will replace the smart phone, which replaced the dumb phone and the pager and the PDA before it. A cell phone or mobile phone is a device that can make and receive telephone calls over a cellular network. Modern phones have a variety of services such as text messaging, multimedia messages, email, internet, applications, photography and bluetooth.
Yet over the years we’ve yet to offer an alternative interface that wasn’t a handheld device. Improvements to the technology in the form of smart watches and google glass are enhancing the possibilities but what if we pushed the envelope just a little more? Rucha Patwardhan and Alina Balean set to explore that question. They are both graduate students at NYU’s ITP and over this spring semester they explored the ways fabric can be used with electronics. In a course called “Towers of Power” they learned how to DIY a cell phone with an Arduino and an Arduino GSM shield.
They knew that they wanted to build an object that isn’t a piece of glass that lives in a pocket. The smart hoodie was born. The concept of putting the technology instead a cell phone into something truly wearable and everyday is what this project stands to represent. Gestures that used to require your fingers on a tiny piece of glass now are translated into everyday movement, buttons no more. The future of communication is in our hands… or arms not just our fingers.
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