InnoSummer 2010: Wearable Computing

Wearable Computing revolved around electronics worn on the body. We were asked to come up with concepts and prototypes that either had a social and/or a context-aware aspect in them. In addition, the prototypes were supposed to be relatively cheap to make, so we had to avoid any high technology solutions. In the end, we wanted the final products to be cool and awesome, and not just some nerdy electronics. (And don't get me wrong on this, a certain type of nerdiness is definitely cool!) So, what we actually made were essentially two prototypes: the navigation hat, and the game shirt.

The game shirt

The game shirt is a special T-shirt that has LED lights and other electronics stitched on it. What this prototype does is it displays Tic-Tac-Toe games with the LED lights on the front of the shirt, and as such makes you look cool. We wanted to have an idea of how people would react to such a shirt, but sadly, the project took longer than initially expected and we couldn't test it out in the open. However, from the reactions of other InnoSummer teams, we concluded that this shirt definitely was cool.

The game shirt is currently displaying games of Tic-Tac-Toe, but if you think about it, this isn't just about X's and O's, or board games in general, but essentially LED displays on a shirt (or other textiles). The prototype can be extended with various modules, ranging from heart rate monitors and compasses to color displays and Bluetooth mobile connections. Although the current implementation could be described as crude, it still shows the basic potential of the idea.

The navigation hat

The navigation hat is a baseball cap with a special brim that has white & red LED lights stitched under it. Combined with a microcontroller and a compass module, the brim lights up the white LED that is currently pointing North, or the red LED that is currently pointing South. The cap shows the wearer their orientation in relation to Earth's magnetic field at any given moment, effectively acting as sort of an artificial sixth sense.

There have previously been similar concepts that use haptic feedback, such as a belt that constantly vibrates to the North. (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.04/esp.html) Even though traditional compasses visualize the direction, there seemed to be no products on the market that would enable constant directional feedback in a visual way. We thought this might have practical uses, for example in orienteering, so we decided to implement a prototype of this product.

The equipment needed to assemble the navigation hat is relatively cheap, and potentially we could add additional modules and link them to the existing microcontroller. For instance, with a BlueTooth module and a mobile application, the cap could communicate with the user's mobile phone equipped with a GPRS, the user could define a point of interest inside the mobile application and use the cap as a BlueTooth compass peripheral to highlight the point of interest instead of North. Another way of extending product potential could be a directional microphone, which could then be used to visualize audio around you. Apart from music enthusiasts, the product could also serve the needs of the hearing impaired and provide them with an artificial fifth sense of sound.