Wearable tech sees, uses the light of day
More gadgets appear, but many still need work
Dutch NEW YORK designer Pauline van Dongen isn’t your ordinary fashionista. Her company, Wearable Solar, specializes in hightech clothing.
Exhibiting with other Netherlands start-ups at South By Southwest in Austin recently, van Dongen revealed prototypes of a black “solar” dress and a solar coat that collect and store enough energy to charge a smartphone.
Concealed inside a leather panel on the dress is a thin foil of 72 flexible solar cells. The 48 crystalline cells on the coat are more rigid, and placed behind leather openings or ‘windows.’ Women wearing either garment need only be out in the sun for an hour, van Dongen says, to gather enough energy to juice up their smartphones by 50%. An attached cord lets you plug your phone into this rather unconventional power source via micro USB.
“Wearable technology is literally what it says,” says van Dongen. “All the things that we (will) carry around, like smart watches and Google Glass, they all need continuous power. Wearable Solar aims to give a sustainable solution to these problems that we’ll be facing more and more.”
It remains to be seen precisely when or if the Wearable Solar duds will see the light of the day in the marketplace.
These are still primitive days for wearables of all types, and it’s obvious that not every company coming into the space, large or unknown, will succeed. But as was evident at SXSW and elsewhere, there’s enormous interest in the wearable category, with products all over the place.
The Logbar Ring, for example, uses Bluetooth to let you, among other things, draw text in the air and have the letters recognized. The Skully augmented-reality motorcycle helmet incorporates an intelligent heads-up display and rear-view camera.
Google Glass has probably attracted most of the early attention to wearables so far — never mind that for all the hype, it still hasn’t been released as a consumer offering.
But we’ve also seen a slew of smart watches and fitness bracelets in the last year or two.
On Tuesday, Google announced a variation of the Android platform for wearables called Android Wear, which represents, potentially, a major step in pushing wearables into the mainstream.
Using a compatible smart watch — Asus, HTC, LG, Motorola, Samsung and Fossil are among the early partners — you can ask out loud, “OK, Google, what time does my flight leave?” or “OK, Google, make a dinner reservation at wherever.”
Such watches promise even more, from monitoring exercise to firing up a music playlist by voice. And they exploit the Goo- gle Now service that provides search suggestions before you actively search yourself. The proof will be in the execution and styling.
“We’re so excited about wearables — they understand the context of the world around you, and you can interact with them simply and efficiently, with just a glance or a spoken word,” Google Senior Vice President Sundar Pichai wrote in the blog post that accompanied Google’s news.
Even before the announcement, I planned to test the Gear 2 smart watch that Samsung will soon be shipping. I only hope it’s better than its disappointing predecessor. Samsung’s upcoming Gear Fit bracelet, a fitnessoriented variation on the new watch, is attractive and promising, too, though I’ll again reserve judgment until I’ve had a chance to review it.
Everyone is still waiting to see what steps Apple will take. If the rumored Healthbook app said to be included in iOS 8 software comes to be — the app apparently tracks vital health signs — it practically begs Apple to produce the companion watch that’s been speculated about for more than a year.
I’ve been wearing the Pebble Steel smart watch lately and like it a lot more the first Pebble. It’s far better looking and now boasts an app store to go with it.
Challenges abound, with all the various efforts. A start-up called EnergyBionics is struggling to meet its funding goals on Kickstarter for the Carbon wearable solar-charging watch that it plans to sell for $95 to $130. When you’re not using Carbon as an analog watch, you can use it to charge your phone (or other gadgets) by unscrewing a hinged cap and plugging in a USB cable.
Wearable Solar’s van Dongen faces her own hurdles. The solar film used in her dress wasn’t specially produced for textiles, and clothes need to be washed.
Van Dongen says she’s in touch with partners to create solar-harvesting fibers that can be weaved or knitted into the garments, potentially freeing designers to produce sportswear, military clothing or even the sails of a boat.