Wearables for joining a party

Everyone has a unique way of embracing the joy of a situation. When you want to bring energy and a situation to life, each person has something close to them – colour, light, music, movement.

We’ve created a series of wearables that allow you to show your personality and get people excited about movement and being together. No more debbie-downers! Bring any situation to life with your own physical extension of your energy.

Make your own music when you get up and dance:

Snap your fingers along to the music to light yourself up and change the colours:

Style yourself with lights that you can turn on, but turn off when the big lights come on:    

And program again if you want to change the rules!

Alfonso, Carol, Tanti: UNREVEALA_Exposure Alert Device

Do we all have a common problem whenever you hire the plumber, and have you ever wonder why he has to reveal his butt in your face?  Unless you are attracted to your plumber, most of us will invariably feel either absolute embarrassment or disgust.  It happens to the female species as well, there are instances that we did not want to reveal as much as we want to.  With the un-revealer,  the light sensor on the  plumber’s belt can signify and warn him to lower his vulgarity.   He either has to pull his pants up or cover with his shirt, un-revealing his butt crack.

As for the woman, under the skirt or underneath her low cut shirt or dress, it will signify that she also needs to cover up.  The signal goes from absolute darkness, no light, green, you are safe, yellow, approaching danger, and red, definitely needs to do something to cover up. Or it can work as reverse, to attract your prey.

// Main Materials

1. LightBlue Bean and variable resistor as light intensity sensor

2. LEDs, each colours for different warning

// Process

Photo Above: Setting the light intensity range.

Amy, Sebastian & Theresa – Intergalactic Wearables!

Our universe is intergalactic and constantly at war.

Each person has a wearable that is inspired by a character in Star Wars. The first was a light saber inspired by Luke Skywalker, which lights up when the wearer grips the saber. Another is a gun inspired by Princess Leia, which blinks and buzzes when the wearer grips the gun. The third is a helmet inspired by the infamous Darth Vader, which blinks and buzzes when the wearer makes a gesture of The Force.

Ideally, upon meeting or at battle, if one of us feels threaten, we would use our prospective wearable to either defend ourselves from harm or to threaten the other.

Interestingly, by embedding technologies in wearables that can cause harm or create fear, we are further establishing a hostile world. In fact, since each wearable is structurally different, each wearer takes on a different persona that may be perceived as adversarial to the other.

Though this is good and fun, with light sabers, gun shots and using light to illustrate The Force, the antagonistic interactions we have created does beg the question of a wearable’s potential to cloud well-meaning intentions, which wouldn’t have happened otherwise if the wearable wasn’t worn at the beginning.

In other words, be aware of what your wear… it can bring you to the dark side.

Process:

Testing out Luke Skywalker’s light saber:

Princess Leia’s gun:

Wearing the Darth Vader Helmet:

The battle:

Tanti: My Kind of Social Wearables

1. VIGOUR

“Vigour is a Product Service System that enables geriatric patients, physiotherapists and family to gain more insight in the exercises and progress of a rehabilitation process. A knitted cardigan with integrated stretch sensors monitors the movements of the upper body, and communicates this data to the service provider.” – Vigour Web –

I like this type of wearable tech is because it helps a very fundamental needs of a person, which is to communicate as in having our brain memory and reasonings-skill works. How it works basically the cardigan is used while the dementia patient does her/his physical movements therapy and it records the movements that are made, so the therapist/doctor has the data about that particular exercise. During patient’s daily activity and next therapy, the integrated iPad-app for the cardigans will tell therapist/doctor if patient is able to repeat the movements or making any progress. The design is also not gadgety, it is a very humble design with calm colours.

Dementia is a chronic disorder that not only affecting a person, but his/her surroundings, this is how I see wearable tech should really proceed in the future, really giving an fundamental impact of a person’s life also people around her/him.

2. REALITY MEDIATORS

Dezeen: These wearable devices by designer Ling Tan cause unpleasant sensations when the wearer becomes inactive or stops concentrating. Reality Mediators project hooks up wearable sensors that detect muscle movements, brainwave activity and GPS location with four different devices that cause discomfort to the body. If the wearer stops moving or has a lull in mental activity for too long they will experience either an electric shock, an unpleasant sound, intense heat or irritating vibration. For example, when the brainwave activity sensors and muscle electrical stimulation armband are worn, electric shocks are emitted when brain activity is low but cease when concentration levels increase.

I like this one because it keeps you “social” and focus because you will be given uncomfortable sensation if our brain is idle or distracted from our default activity.

3. IMOGEN HEAP’S MUSIC GLOVES

This is my personal favourite for awhile because I love music and by wearable technology, music can really make a change for people with disability by making or playing music. Music itself is a social tool, but this gadget could really enhance the level of people’s interaction through music.

Social Wearables – Alfonso

My social wearable selection goes like this:

BRAGI

Is an all-in one wearable fitness and lifestyle device combining a wireless in ear headphone, a MP3 player, a microphone, a Bluetooth headset, a fitness tracker as well as a heart rate monitor.

The social part comes from the communication feature built in the device, you can speak and communicate with others

http://www.bragi.com/

The SavorBand

With this band you can remember everything you’ve tasted in an event, get recipes and tips from top chefs, plus grab discounts and goodies. It can be delivered in a variety of different events, is easy to use, you just use the 2-word code (that you can find on your SavorBand) and email to access your digital memory bank.

The social aspect of this wearable is the creation of a social memory of different events, the idea of creating, and sharing a commond memory.

http://savorband.esurance.com/

 

Jawbone

Jawbone turns raw data into your personal fitness advisor. The goal of this band is that you make better choices everyday. The most interesting aspect for me is the fashion design of the band, you can have it in different models and looks.

As a social perspective Jawbone offer the user to choose other apps to get integrated, so it is not the wearable itself the one who dictates the social connectivity but the user activity in other social apps.

https://jawbone.com/marketplace

https://jawbone.com/

Social Wearable Examples – Amy

While picking products and thinking about how they are associated with social interactions, I feel it might be interesting to do this from the perspective of what kind of the interfaces those wearables are built with in order to implement the social function. There are three different types listed below.

1. Interfaces built with data

Wearables in this group collect data from our body and enable the social communication by sharing data with people. The data interface is usually visualized on other platforms, such as Facebook or a dedicated web/mobile application. Activity trackers may be the most well-known representative.

Example: Fitbit Surge

Surge is the professional collection in Fitbit family. It functions more like a smart watch with a screen. With more sensors built in, it provides more powerful features than normal Fitbit trackers, such as GPS tracking and heart rate monitoring. The leaderboard on Fitbit platform is the interface where social interactions take place.

2. Tangible/Visible Interfaces

This type of wearables aims to provide more natural social interactions that are more tangible and visible. They react accordingly by sensoring our body movement, the surrounding environment and even our brain activity. These devices become a new input/output of our body.

Example: Lumos Helmet

Lumos Helmet is a bicycle helmet that addresses on safety issues. Its highligts integrated brake and turn singal lights. It is very new and still running a campaign on Kickstarter. What interests me the most here is that the helmet itself actually talks to your surroundings for you. It tries to predict your behivors and buids up a natural communication channel using a visible interface.

3. Virtual Reality

The third group of wearables adopts VR and enables the social communication in a fancy way. By wearing on the device, people can interact with others directly and naturally in the virtual world. With several pioneering products and prototypes out there, such as Oculus and Microsoft HoloLens, this group has drawn pulic’s attention and brought VR out of research labs to the market.

Example: Microsoft HoloLens

HoloLens is not designed for social communications. Microsoft put it in a much bigger picture and introduced it as the next generation computer. However, it could also enable an entirely new era of social interactions. We may be able to build another identity in the virtual world just like the story in the Japanese Manga Accel World.

Social Wearable Examples

I am interested in wearable jewelry,the following are two examples of existing ring projects:

1) “Fin”, a Bluetooth ring that turns your hand into a wireless controller, hits its funding goal in indie-go-go last year. Fin is worn on your thumb and has a tiny optical sensor that detects movements, allowing you to send commands to connected devices with a few swipes and taps of your fingers. For example, you can turn down your phone’s volume by swiping your thumb down your index finger or skip the current track by swiping your thumb across the palm of your opposite hand.

2) “Smarty Ring”, a ring to control your smartphone. Has a small screen where you can read your facebook, sms or any message that gets to you phone. Succesfully crowdfunded through Kickstarter, it seems first release received lots of complains. Here is a picture of the proposed product:

 

 

 

Brittany: My Social Wearable picks

The three wearables that I think are really interesting are social in very different ways:

1. Social NeuroFashion:

Lauren Bowker, a fashion designer and founder of The Unseen experiments mostly in colour-changing ink. She’s created a headdress made of 4,000 lab-grown Swarovski crystals dunked in a colour-changing ink. The ink changes as it comes into contact with the heat and electrical patterns that occur through the body as we live, breath, think and feel.

This headdress is social not only in it’s ability to showcase who we are from a fashion aesthetic, but also changing colour when and how we think!

2. A cozy social learner

Luna is a small company with big dreams. While not really a “wearable” it does share a lot of qualities that I would argue makes it “wearable-esque.” It’s a bed system that adjust temperatures for each person in the bed – but also learns from your habits. What makes it more interesting is that it also works as a sleep tracker and combined with metrics about your day, it starts to make recommendations on optimal sleeping and waking conditions – including a silent alarm. It continuously learns to regulate itself without your input, and works to give each person the best rest and highest energy levels for the day.

As a second phase, the company intends to integrate into smart home technology such as thermostats (nest), locks (lockitron), etc.

I feel like this device is social in the way that it communicates with multiple people using it at once, and learns from their habits to adjust to their needs – and that the current goal is to give them the most energy for their day. In the future, this sociability is only strengthened when it starts to communicate with home devices to make the entire home an extension of the user.

3. A social wonderland

Moff is a startup company creating wearable bracelets for children that turn every day items into magical toys. It’s reactive to movement, and then adds playful sound effects. A stick becomes a magic wand sparkling and wooshing at your command! It is play at it’s core, and is so single-minded and fun that it brings people together into the imaginations and wonderland of the children wearing it.

Examples of Social Wearables – Nirish Shakya

Wearables are the next smartphones – almost everyone will wear one. With consumer devices such as the FitBit gaining popularity in recent years, the term ‘wearables’ has almost become a household name. Even designers have started adopting a ‘wearables first‘ implementation after a successful run of it’s older sibling – mobile first. However, the technology is still in its infancy and the full potential of wearables is yet to be realised. Meanwhile, here are three examples of social wearables, devices that you can wear on your body and that enable some form of social collaboration.

Traffic light shirt

One of the most basic technologies used as social wearables are coloured shirts worn during traffic light parties. Guests wear coloured shirts depending on their relationship status, for example, red for in a relationship or not looking for a relationship, green for single and available and amber for maybe or in an open relationship. The colour of the shirt communicates the person’s intent without the need for a conversation. Striking a conversation with a stranger can be difficult for a lot of people and the shirt makes it easier to do just that.

http://www.justframeless.com/images/blog/trafficlight.jpg

Oculus Rift multiplayer games

Virtuix have created a set of devices including a treadmill, walking shoes and tracking belt that works with Oculus Rift to let multiple users play a multiplayer game at the same time. Most multiplayer games till now has been limited to the screen and the Virtuix’s products, albeit at an early stage, show the potential of social wearables in virtual reality (VR). VR provides an immersive social experience for the wearer and has a lot of potential applications in different forms of social collaboration, for example, architects and engineers exploring virtual floorpans together and long-distance communication where communicators can virtually be in the same room.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQ3vQ85tR0Q

Apple Watch

The usefulness of the Apple Watch will heavily depend on the usefulness of its apps, just like its predecessors, the iPhone and the iPad. One of the apps that has started using a very basic social feature is Nike+ Running app on the Apple Watch. The app lets you send and receive cheers. Social motivation on a wearable device can potentially have a bigger impact on the individual that on a mobile phone or a bigger computer as the wearable device is on the user more often and looking at the motivational notifications on the Apple Watch takes less effort (just a flick of the wrist) than on a phone where the user needs to pull the phone out of the pocket which might not always be possible (e.g. during a workout or a game).

http://a2.mzstatic.com/us/r30/Purple6/v4/40/53/7c/40537cc0-f9f9-b3e6-b5fb-aabefa1bec0a/screen390x390.jpeg

It’s an exciting period for technology as it’s starting to move beyond screens and buttons and becoming an embedded part of our lives. However, the big question that remains to be answered is – ‘Will social wearables help us become more compassionate, empathetic and meaningful to others or will they continue the trend of technology distancing us even further from fundamental human to human communications?’ What do you think? Leave your comments below.

Lotte & Sebastian – Unsocial Flower

Most european people are not used to close physical contact when commuting. During rush hour it happens that trains and busses are very crowded. When there is good weather and it’s hot outside, touching each other while commuting is even more uncomfortable. Normally people don’t want to be obtrusive and actually complain about the proximity of the other person verbally. This is where Unsocial Flower comes in. Whenever a stranger comes as close as actually touching your arms, an alarm will sound together with some lights flashing. This will indicate that the stranger is supposed to back off a bit. The flowerish design embodies the notion of giving a friendly hint instead of actually complaining. This allows to retain your privacy while also keeping up the good vibes.

Demo Video

The following video shows a scenario where two strangers have en encounter in a public place where one of the strangers approaches the other one who is already standing there.

http://youtu.be/hsc8lxByiNE

Process

Circuit Diagram

For crafting the Unsocial Flower we used a simple combination of two LEDs and a buzzer that we’ve put in series.