Sleeping jacket

Matthew Gale designed a jacket that functions as a sleeping aid for when you're on public transit, called Excubo. He came up with the concept after learning that people sleep on public transportation when their bodies are held in a rigid state rather than loose and bouncing around.

Couple this idea with Timothy Dubitsky's Hood.e that integrates headphones into the hood and you can drown out the ambient noise that comes with public transportation by lulling yourself to sleep with your music. All of this, of course, would be discretely integrated into the garment so it becomes your second skin while helping you catch your Z's.

Exploring Smart Textiles

CuteCircuit hosted a workshop at Interface-University of Ulster, Belfast, that explored smart textiles and soft circuits. The workshop included textile designers from Interface Research Lab and resulted in some beautiful color-changing, shapeshifting, and light pattern textiles.

Rather than simply attaching displays to clothing, imagine a line of garments with gorgeous ambient displays like this integrated into the patterns that react and change depending on input from your environment or the people around.

Additional photos via Francesca [at] CuteCircuit's photostream.

Haute Tech Keyboard Jeans

Erik De Nijs designed jeans with an integrated soft keyboard, called Beauty and the Geek. The pants have a softkeyboard integrated across the front so when you sit, it is naturally located where you would place an external keyboard. A mouse is conveniently connected to the back pocket and there are a pair of "crotch rocking" speakers located in the knees.

The absurdity and humor of the keyboard pants capitalizes on "Geek" culture and fashion. Described by Vous Pensez, It "is the perfect solution for Googling quick exits while running from the fashion police." The most hilarious function is a gamers joystick located behind the zipper. By placing it there, Nijs forces the wearer to put their hand down their pants to control the game, making a comment on game culture and the persona of gamers.

Nijs could have prototyped this garment by attaching hard plastic controllers to a pair of pants. Instead, he used a variety of soft-switches and controllers that are becoming more readily available on the market, such as Fibretronic's wearable remote control and ElekTex's fabric keypads, to seamlessly integrate into the garment. Aside from the humorous implementation, the result offers a new platform for interaction that is soft, flexible, and technically functional.

Additional info at talk2myshirt.

Spray-on Solar Cells

(image source via Solar Power Technofix)

PYRON SOLAR INC., in cooperation with Boeing-Spectrolab has invented miniature spray-on solar cells that can be dissolved and printed onto flexible material and there's a lot of buzz about the opportunites that this new alternative source of power introduces.

Solar-Cells.com envisions the cells sprayed directly into garment textiles: "A sweater is already absorbing all sorts of light both in the infrared and the visible," said Sargent. "Instead of just turning that into heat, as it currently does, imagine if it were to turn that into electricity."

Xiaomei Jiang of the University of South Florida says: "I think these materials have a lot more potential than traditional silicon," Jiang said. "They could be sprayed on any surface that is exposed to sunlight — a uniform, a car, a house." (Source via MSNBC) And even our clothing.

Touch-Sensitive Apparel

Yasmine Abbas and Cati Vaucelle are currently working on a project called Touch-Sensitive. Through their low-fidelity prototypes, they are asking the question: "What if objects that people carry with them and even carry on them could offer this sensory comfort that they seem to seek? ... Touch·Sensitive allows the diffusion of tactile information through computational and mechanical technologies. It is a computerized touch therapy apparel whose modular pieces can be integrated within the clothing... [and] provides individuals with a sensory cocoon."

What intrigues me about this investigation is that they aim to seamlessly integrate the technology directly into the fabrics so that it's hidden but functional. The technology then informs the aesthetics of both form and behavior, without feeling like an add-on.

Headphones in your hoodie

Timothy Dubitsky created hood.e, a jacket with integrated headphones that broadcasts music into your ears from any mp3 player you plug into it. With an aim towards safety when walking through urban environments, Dubitsky integrated the headphones directly into the fabric of the hoodie so it plays music in your ears without blocking everything else out.

I've seen a lot of jackets with integrated headphones. Unfortunately, most of them simply allow for you to weave your own headphones into your garment to hide the wires and to keep it in place. Kudos to Dubitsky for designing a solution that is functional, solves a problem of safety, and that integrates the technology directly into the garment. My only question: will it handle the wash?

Additional source via Core77