The Video Coat from David Forbes is the ultimate wearable display hack I came across so far. Many artists and Haute Tech designers embrace the idea of animating clothing with light effects and images.

Having worked myself in this field intensively for a couple of years I know how challenging this endeavor is, what hard work it demands to even produce a demonstrator prototype.

Light animated textiles are one of the biggest challenges in the wearable technology domain. Difficult to realize but hugely rewarding once it can be done. Creating fluid light pattern or like this design even motion pictures on a garment never ever fails the surprise, amaze people when watch the real-time transformation of the pattern on garments.

David’s Video Coat is essentially a fully functional TV set working with regular NTSC video signal. The display has a resolution of 160×120 pixel/LED, if you do the math this ends up in 19,200 LEDs!

Clusters of LED’s are mounted on strips of Flex-PCB which in turn cover the coats front, back and even include the arm parts. The screen basically wraps around the body giving to bystanders a 360 degree viewing experience.

Click over to David’s project page and check out more images and technical details.

To see the Video Coat in action, below is one of the videos David has put on his YouTube account.

The Video Coat deserves a place in the history of wearable displays by pushing the boundaries of imagination far into the future – may be not as commercial product in this form but it triggers a lot of attention and excitement of what could be possibly done.

[via: Geekologie]

Life Dress is a highly interesting wearable electronic design by Elizabeth Fuller, student at NYU’s ITP, and exploring wearable technology, web development and user interface.

The dress is formed out of soft silicon tiles containing each an LED. The tiles are electrically and physically connected, creating a dragon skin style dress.

Powered by an Arduino, the dress shifts it’s light pattern according to the rules of Conway’s ‘Game of Life’ which defines:  a lone cell cannot survive by itself but too many companions can overwhelm a cell and it will die. Each dragon skin square of the dress represents a cell that will light up or not based on the rules of life.

A beautiful concept that creates a ever changing, random light and color pattern on the dress – remarkable beautiful idea.

As each LED cell can be turned on or off individually, the dress can be programmed to display characters, emoticons or even serve as low-res display.

The complete process of making this dress can be found on Elizabeth’s project blog.

Even tough the use of silicon enclosures might limit the wearability of this dress, the concept idea opens, or should I say invites, to transform this concept to more textile like materials.

Embedding LEDs into textile patches and sew them together or create a separated cell structure on a sheet of fabric, using LED light diffusion material like thin foam to create a cell appearance or use the game of life animation on a dress which has spread LEDs all over – this concept will beautifully blend into our life by altering it’s appearance on a continuos basis like our life keeps on changing constantly.

The Life Dress is part of the NYU’s currently running ITP Winter Show.

[via: Gizmodo]

While OLEDs are the hype of today when it comes to flexible, bright and colorful displays able to be integrated into clothing, a team of scientist is already working on the next big technology which could change the rule of the wearable display game.

OLEDs (organic light-emitting diodes) offer faster refresh rates and brighter colors than conventional LCDs but the newly developed iLEDs (inorganic light-emitting diodes) exceed the OLEDs in terms of brightness, making them ideal for outdoor use during daylight.

The iLED technology can be found already today in larger outdoor signage but due to the current fabrication process, iLED technology is more expensive than OLED and requires a larger display area, low resolution displays.

Besides the extreme brightness, according to Ioannis Kymissis, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Columbia University, we are talk about reaching one tenth of the brightens of the sun, the life span of inorganic LEDs (iLEDs) can be 100,000 hours or more, three times longer than OLEDs.

The new approach to iLED-fabrication offers a more effective means of fabricating and assembling smaller and thinner iLEDs, says research leader John Rogers from the University of Illinois and colleagues from Northwestern University, the Institute of High Performance Computing in Singapore, and Tsinghua University in Beijing.

The research work is funded by Ford Motor Co. which is interested into car interior surface lightning, covering the soft curves with light emitting layers, the National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Energy.

As with many research projects, also this new iLED will take time to surface on our clothing but it does look very much visible as most of the technology and production processes are well known but need to be tweaked for producing little suns on our sleeves.

[via: Scientific America]

A team of scientist at the Technical University in Dresden / Germany has demonstrated a new display technology that adds to the visible information representation the tactile dimension.

The display is formed of hydro gel droplets the size of 0.3 millimeter packing 297 ‘pixels’ onto just one square centimeter, a pretty high resolution.

Hydro gels are a type of material used for example to make soft contact lenses and consist mainly of water bound up within a polymer. Some types of hydro gels can swell or shrink in response to changing conditions like temperature.

The two scientists Andreas Richter and Georgi Paschew created a square array of 4225 blobs of temperature-sensitive hydro gel on a black polyester backing that heats up when hit by a beam of light.

The pixels are 0.5 millimeters tall but if heated to 35 °C they release some of their water and shrink by half, getting harder and change to opaque creating a visual as well as tactile representation of the displays content.

Once the light beam moves away from a pixel, its temperature quickly drops and the gel swells back to its previous size, sucking up its lost water. The whole system is sealed beneath a plastic membrane to prevent water from escaping.

The phase change of the hydro gel between liquid and solid can be done as fast as 2x per second which makes it a bit too slow for watching videos but this is not intended by the team as they see their target user group in enabling visually impaired people to see/feel information.

As the materials involved in this system are soft and flexible, I can very well imagine how this technology could be integrated into accessories like bags our pouches for cell phones enabling visually impaired people to read/feel text messages in braille.

According to the article by New Scientist, the technology still needs some tweaking like lowering the temperature at which the gel response but most of the groundwork is done and to bring this technology into reality might be sooner than one might expect.

We will certainly stay on the lookout and report back any new breakthrough from this ‘morphing gel display’.

[source: New Scientist]

Extending our wearable display topic from yesterday, we found another amazing wearable display from a company called ‘EroGear‘.

But unlike to our story yesterday, EroGear is offering their wearable display integrated in any jacket of your choice.

Here are some of the impressive features EroGear is offering in their tailor made display jackets: a software package that takes still images and exports them into a proprietary format for use with EroGear displays. Video content is uploaded by first exporting a video file then running it through the software.

Three ways are on offer to create the display content. Inputing the text directly on the display controller for a scrolling ‘stock-ticker’ like text animation. Secondly, you can pre-render text or graphic using video rendering programs Apple’s Motion 3 or Adobe After Effects.

Thirdly, EroGear is working on a library of video content to be available for download like ring-tones for cell phones or CD-cover artwork in iTunes.

Other available options for a tailor made display jacket: DMX support for synchronization of multiple displays, the addition of an SD card for additional content storage and Audio reactivity which can trigger animations or text by audio signals. To complete the list of options, there is a control button on the display controller allowing the brightness adjustment of the display to make sure you are always the brightest spot in the universe.

All this is an amazing step towards wearable displays which transform our jackets into living, transformable clothing allowing a high degree of self-expression and customization.

Check out the video below, it shows a nice demonstration of the wearable LED Display from EroGear:

Your most burning question might be: ‘How much does it cost?’ It’s not easy to answer because it depends greatly on the size of the display you want.

EroGear gives as reference their first prototype as a example: an Armani Exchange lightweight running jacket with an 88×8 display resolution, a ‘lite’ display controller, a 2 hour battery and video patterns made by EroGear comes out for a total of around $900.-

We interact in the real, physical world in many different ways like seeing (visual), hearing (audio), taste, smell (olfaction) and touch (tactile).

Our interaction with the virtual world is comparatively limited mostly to visual and audio and in some cases tactile like some video game controller.

A Wearable Tactile Display could add the touch dimension to the way we interact with the virtual world and our electronic devices. Imagine getting ‘read out’ from our electronic device without having to look at a screen very much like getting a gentle tap on the shoulder or arm from someone to direct our attention to a certain direction or affirmative confirmation.

Researchers at the Sungkyunkwan University in Korea and the University of Nevada (US) have developed a flexible tactile display that could be part of our clothing enabling us a more physical interaction with our electronic devices without relying on the visual element only.

Ig Mo Koo, Hyouk Ryeol Choi, and co-authors from Sungkyunkwan University and the University of Nevada created an electro active polymer that can stimulate the skin without using any additional electromechanical transmission. The polymer sheet which consists of eight layers of dielectric elastomer actuator films is about 210 micrometers thick.

In their study, the researchers fabricated an 11 x 14 mm sheet with Velcro on the edges, and rolled it up in the shape of a thimble to be worn on the finger.

The display conveys information to the wearer when the electrodes induce a voltage across the films. A voltage causes the films to compress down and expand outward. In doing so, the films put pressure on the wearer’s skin, inducing a “mild sensation.”

The wearable tactile display concept looks ‘simple’ but it will require further work before the presumed benefits of efficient power usage, cost-effectiveness, and easy fabrication will be realized.

Nevertheless, it shows how the tactile interaction between virtual and real world, between wo/men and machine could be realized. A wearable tactile display has a diverse application potential like rescue and first response gear, in medical and tele medical garments and gloves, in sport apparels and wearable gaming accessories.

Once the wearable tactile displays becomes available I would love to see it in my shirt giving me a gentle tap on my arm whenever a new email arrives on my Blackberry.

[source: Physorg]