Right after the Smart Fabrics Conference in Rome another highly interesting event around smart textiles takes place on March 18 and 19 at the Royal College of Physicians, London, UK.

Titled the ‘Innovations in Textiles 2009: Smart, nano and technical textiles for medical, industrial and clothing applications‘ will bring together multiple disciplines and various technologies and developments in the textiles arena.

Organized by the Institute of Nanotechnology this conference will have an application side, as to where textile developments can be used by various industries, as well as keeping the audience up to date on the latest technologies and ideas being developed.

Nano technologies enable many e-textile innovations as we have seen throughout the past few years makeing this conference highly interesting for research and industry experts. Participants will gain insights of the latest developments in textile technologies and learn about new developments affecting the textile industry.

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Looking to the extreme low temperatures in parts of US and Europe I was looking around for jackets that keep comfy warm in the most extreme temperatures and look cool/chic.

Heated clothing comes to my mind but many of the products on offer are kind of bleak and black. Burtons LTD Heated Dream Jacket for women is already for the second season in the market but still looks ‘refreshing’, charming and warming.

The Heated Dream Jacket comes with a battery-powered internal heater. Should you forget to recharge the batteries on those frigid January days, don’t despair, the slim-fit Heated Dream also comes stuffed with insulation in form of a 10K-rated waterproof fabric, taped seams, and powder skirt protect your base layers from getting damp.

The jacket has 3 settings: low at 85 degrees for 4+ hours, Medium at 98 degrees for 3 hours and toasty high at 110 for 2 hours. The battery pack is about 5×4x0.5 inch and takes about 5 hours to fully charge.

The price has gone down from last years introduction as well costing now $ $279.96 via this online store for example.

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Want to add some sparkle to your wardrobe, cushions or bags? Neon Trim has a wide selection of soft, flexible Neon wires for DIY enthusiasts to add light elements to clothing and more.

The site is full of information about how EL (Electroluminescent) wires work and how to use them. Getting the next rocking stage wear a la Duft Punk is easy to make yourself with the EL-kits on offer.

If you want to light up the dark days of this winter season checkout their
online store for some inspiration. Adding some light emitting elements to your outfit will greatly increase your visibility in the low light conditions, it’s easy to integrate and fun.

I like the cute light up shoelaces which are waterproof and resistant to slipping and pulling forces. They are sold ready for use but only a few pieces are left as Neon Trim has unfortunately discontinued this type of EL-wire.

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IntertechPira released the final program details for its 5th Smart Fabrics conference which takes center stage from March 10-12 at the Holiday Inn Rome West Hotel in Rome, Italy.

The fifth edition of the Smart Fabrics conference is packed full with high profile speakers and presentations. To serve the growing number of available information and interests, this years conference will feature parallel sessions focusing on topics of Business Perspective chaired by Stacey Burr from Textronics, Visionary Applications chaired by Martijn Krans from Philips and the Technology and Innovation session chaired by Danilo de Rosi Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Pisa.

The conference is held on March 11 and 12 with a plenary session in the morning and the above listed parallel sessions in the afternoon. It will be a tough decision to be made for visitors which of those topics to visit as all of them have experts from the top wearable electronic companies and institutes lines up.

A special highlight is the preceding half-day workshop on March 10 lead by Maksim Skorobogatiy from the University of Montreal and Kathy Schicker (we have posted about her ‘weaving with light‘) from Central Saint Martins College, London will get an insight in the findings of the collaboration between these two institutions on photonic textiles.

You still can claim an early bird 10% discount when booking before Jan 30. Check out IntertechPira’s Smart Fabrics conference site or download the full program details.

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What better, bigger start into the new wearable electronic year could there be as to announce the availability of the ‘king of interactive clothing’ the long awaited NavJacket from O’Neill.

The NavJacket is not only cool, it is uber cool as this sophisticated jacket comes with an sophisticated social networking tool that allows the uploading and sharing of your rides down the slopes on 420 European ski areas and on 180 skiing resorts in United States.

Check out the NavJacket online community as there are already some active members racing downhill and share their rides.

It’s like the Nike+ site for runner but even more interesting as you can show on Google Earth where you have been and leave your mark in form of ‘here is my favorite spot’ or ‘here I crashed terrible’ with the POI (point of interest) button on the jacket.

The navigation throughout a ski resort is as easy as checking your sleeve display and if you or your friend got lost, the friend-finder function brings you together again.

The price of the NavJacket is as sophisticated as the Jacket itself, €1,200.- ($1,635.-) but one needs to consider that this Jacket has an GPS unit, a LCD display in the sleeve and the e-textile keypad. Order your NavJacket online here.

The Keypad is cleverly design with the 2008/09 O’Neill signature shape of an ‘S’ shape making ‘bling’ navigation easier. On top of this, the NavJacket keypad has color coding for even easier navigation while racing down the hills.

Check out via this link the online simulation of the NavJackets navigation and other cool features.

The NavJacket is without any doubt the most sophisticated Interactive Jacket on the market and sets O’Neill far ahead of any competition in this winter season and I guess for a while longer.

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One of the big challenges in wearable electronic: speaker which can be fully and seamless integrated into clothing transforming a T-Shirt into a speaker system.

NXT’s surface mount system is so far the closest solution but still it requires some bulky sound engine called ‘exciter’ to transform semi stiff EVA into s sound emitting surface.

A group of Chinese researchers at Beijing’s Tsinghua University set out to build the basis for speaker clothing as they discovered that, by zapping an audio-frequency current through a carbon nanotube thin film, it can be made into a wispy-thin high-performance loudspeaker that emits sound in a wide-frequency range and operates without moving parts or magnets.

Sounds like science fiction - right?! But according to the project publication in American Chemical Society’s ‘Nano Letters‘ this technology is actually closer to reality as it sounds.

A fully working prototype can be seen and heard in a couple of amazing videos (scroll down to the bottom of the page) showing how stretchy and flexible this sound wonder material is.

The nanospeakers work based on the thermoacoustic effect. Alternating electrical current running through the thin films of nanotubes heats the surrounding air, causing it to expand and contract, creating sound waves.

If this technology is picked up by some industry heavyweights to develop the production processes a sound Jacket might be in the stores in 2-3 years. Not that bad as the clothing industry uses a 2 year time frame from first concept sketches until a collection hits the shelves.

Research and science shave the habit to be far off away from reality but the stretchy nano speakers sounds very solid.

[source: American Chemical Society]

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Welcome back to talk2myShirt which is running on a new, bigger and faster server to serve you our dear reader in 2009 fully energized and ready to take on the opportunities and challenges of 2009.

Before looking into the wearable electronic crystal ball to check out what 2009 will have in the Interactive Fashion store let’s look back briefly what has and has not happened in the world of Interactive Fashion and Wearable Electronic in 2008.

Over the past 12 month we have seen an explosion on creativity in the field of wearable electronic. Student and designer creating pioneering works of interactive clothing, DIY enthusiasts publish instructions showing amazing simple but highly interesting techniques for e-textile creations and especially in the second half of 2008 a massive introduction of Interactive Clothing by top brands but also new labels dedicated to this fashion segment.

Solar bags, as we predicted last year, was a hot item in the accessory market coming in many designs and styles able to provide free energy to small, portable devices up to laptops.

Many types of heated clothing using advanced textiles which allow seamless integration of heating elements has been another fast growing area of e-textile applications.

A plus point from consumer perspective is the steep price drop we have seen in commercially available interactive clothing and bags.

On the downside in the interactive fashion world, commercially available products are still, like in the previous two years, mainly ‘made for iPod’ and/or only able to control portable devices like MP3 player or cell phones. This is not to say that such functionality is not needed, on the contrary, I believe this is a great feature in certain clothing styles and bags.

But I miss a bit more creativity on the design/integration of such control elements and I do miss more variations on interactive fashion designs.

Using technology in clothing does not necessarily mean it has to be a function that satisfy a need. Technology seamless integrated into clothing to enhance style, design or create emotional elements is what I miss because fashion and clothing is mainly emotion - isn’t it?

Please accompany us during our exploration of Interactive Fashion in 2009 as we start again posting on a daily basis about the happenings and developments around our favorite topic: wearable electronic.

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We hope you enjoyed reading talk2myShirt over the past year, the products we have posted about, the news we reported about and the creative projects presented from visionaries, students and DIY enthusiasts.

We thank you for visiting our blog, for the many tips, contributions and encouragements we received throughout the past year. Your feedback and input is our motivation and reward.

We do make a break from our daily posting over the Holidays but we will keep ourselves busy as we move to a new office and talk2myShirt will move to a new hosting provider having outgrown the capacity of our current hosting service. Please be patient during the coming days as talk2myShirt might experience some down time and teething problems when settling in its new home.

We will be back fully energized on Jan. 2nd to start 2009 with more news about Wearable Electronic and Interactive Fashion.

We wish you peaceful holidays,
Julia & Eric

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Thermo-chromic ink for screen-printing on textiles combined with conductive yarn on the backside to control the color change of the thermo-chromic print is a technique that paints - literally - dynamic pattern changes onto textiles.

Linda Worbin, doctoral candidate in Textiles and Interaction Design at the Swedish School of Textiles has explored over the past few years smart and interactive textiles using  thermo-chromic inks, LEDs as well as electroluminescent wires to create interactive textile displays.

Out of her large portfolio of different objects the Fabrication Bag is for me the most stunning one, maybe because it looks and works as it could become reality anytime soon - provided a manufacturer would pick this idea up.

The concept of the Fabrication Bag is to be meant as an accessory to cell phones that replaces the sound and vibration signals with changes in dynamic textile patterns on the outside and inside of a bag.

The textile of the bag contains multiple layers of thermo-chromic silk-screen print dots that are activated by heat patches underneath. When a incoming call is detected different areas of the heat elements are activated and initiate localized heating of the thermo-chromic print.

We have seen various products and design concepts of an incoming call alert but the Fabrication Bag from Linda Worbin is the most beautiful variant of all.

[via: Fashioning Technology]

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Quiksilver launched their second interactive winter fashion line with the Last Mission Jacket that incorporate Fibretronic’s CONNECTED-wear technology allowing to add any of the growing number of modules to control MP3 players, advanced iPod control or Bluetooth phones.

The Last Mission Jacket comes with the CONNECTED-wear AC2 Volume Controller Module and are compatible with any MP3 or audio player with a headphone port. The AC2 volume control module let you adjust quickly the volume of your player without the need to take is out of the pocket.

Besides the media managing technology, the Last Mission Jacket boasts taped seams, removable hood, interior goggle pocket, stretch powder skirt with loops for connecting jacket to Quiksilver snowboard pants and a mesh/taffeta lining.

Available in three styles/colors for men via this online store for $194.-

It’s refreshing to see again this season a growing number of interactive jackets for the winter season making simple tasks like music player control and phone calls convenient while outdoors and concentrated on action sports or just strolling around town.

Refreshing also to see wearable technology integrated not only in high end, high priced clothing but in more reasonable priced items as well taking away the myth that this kind of technology is too expensive to be available in mid range products.

Mission accomplished by Quiksilver, a funky, hip jacket for the connected people with an action rich lifestyle.

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