Wearable Solar Clothing Fit For Charging

Whether it’s drone-proof hoodies, eye-tracking dresses or pants that let you text from your pocket, these days, clothing is doing a lot more than just making fashion statements and shielding us from the elements.

New to this task-oriented wardrobe is Wearable Solar, a potential clothing line that incorporates solar panels into garments for charging personal electronic devices.

The project led by Christiaan Holland of Dutch creative agency Gelderland Valoriseert, fashion designer Pauline van Dongen, solar panel specialist Gertjan Jongerden and students from theUniversity of Applied Sciences in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

Two prototypes were created — a dress and a coat. Van Dongen said she carefully studied the layered structure in human skin cells, then translated that research into her designs. For example, with the coat, flaps embedded with solar cells can be unfolded on the shoulder and waist when the sun is shining. Alternatively, the flaps easily fold away and can be worn invisibly. Just a head’s up: Be prepared to feel like a lost character from the Matrix or Mortal Kombat, as unfolding the solar flaps is tough look, full of sharp, jutting shoulders and sweeping accents at the waist.

“The coat contains fairly rigid solar cells, which is why I used a combination of wool and leather. These materials both provide the strength needed and are aesthetically pleasing,” Van Dongen tolda Dutch design website. “In total some 48 solar cells are incorporated into modular leather panels, allowing a typical smartphone to be 50 percent charged if worn in the full sun for an hour.”

She added: “For the dress I used flexible solar cells. These are less efficient but are easier to integrate and more comfortable to wear. The dress is made from a flowing lightweight wool combined with leather. The cells have been subtly integrated in such a way that it’s hardly noticeable when you wear the dress as a normal piece of clothing.”

Tilted 3-D Screens Coming Around The Bend

  

Whether for television or mobile devices, most 3-D displays have used autostereoscopic parallax barriers, such as liquid crystal displays, to give users a three-dimensional viewing experience.

However, a team of scientists, led by the University of Bristol, have chosen a different route. They've developed Tilt Displays, a new type of screen composed of nine smaller panels that physically tilt and contort to give the impression of depth.

Mini Camera Gets A Big Brain

Cameras are mounted everywhere in sports these days. During the Olympics we had underwater cams for swimmers and athlete's-eye views for bikes. Now there's a camera that could be mounted on a helmet to record not just the athlete's view but her heart rate, acceleration and loction, too.

Called the INCA, the camera has a processor as powerful as any PC, which allows a lot of functionality crammed into a space less than  three inches on a side. The INCA was designed by the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS.

Gloves Turn Gestures Into Speech

Most hearing people can't understand sign language. A team of students from  the Ukraine built a set of electronic gloves to help bridge that gap. A set of sensors in these gloves, including an accelerometer, compass,  gyroscope and flex sensors in the fingers, translate movement into  signals that a computer converts into speech.

The person wearing the gloves draws a shape in the air. That information is transmitted them via Bluetooth to a  smartphone, which matches the shape up against a set stored in memory. A match produces a sound. For example, waving one's hands in  one pattern produces "nice to meet you" and another pattern produces  "system really works."

The Most Anticipated iPhone 5 [Concepts]

It has been a while, a year and a half of waiting for the iPhone 5 or new iPhone to come out of Cupertino since the day Apple introduce the iPhone 4S back in October 2011. Now we learn so many things already since then —-about what we dream of the iPhone 5 should have aesthetically and feature-wise. Fortunately, there are tons of creative minds to give us a preview of what most consumer’s would think of the new iPhone 5. Now what we have here is a collection of new iPhone concepts that has spilled in the internet, check them pass through the break.

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KEA Debuts World’s Cheapest Digital Camera Made of Cardboard

KEA Debuts World’s Cheapest Digital Camera Made of Cardboard.

KEA Debuts World’s Cheapest Digital Camera Made of Cardboard

It’s official. IKEA has unveiled the world’s cheapest digital camera, and it’s made of cardboard.

But you won’t be able to buy them. KNÄPPA, the eco-friendly lo-fi device, will instead be given away to customers in select stores. The camera uses two AA batteries, and a USB connector that swings out can hold about 40 photos, the BBC reports. It shoots a three-second exposure, and processing lasts about eight seconds. Once users are done shooting, they can transfer and delete photos by holding down a button.



IKEA says it isn’t going into the consumer electronic business. The cameras are designed to promote the PS 2012 furniture collection, urging customers to share images of showroom items on the company’s website.

Wear Your Data with the Safety Pin Flash Drive (Photos)

It never hurts to have a flash drive nearby.

These drives come in a variety of forms that make them easy to transport (ever look at a techie’s keys?). Art Lebedev has created a clever and functional form for the USB drive: a safety pin. Yes, you can wear your data.

Smart design — just don’t forget to remove it before the pants go in the wash. No word on whether this is ruggardized.