Wearable Networks, Creating Hybrid Spaces with Soft Circuits

756 Words2 Pages

With the emergence of augmented eyeglasses, smart watches, and health and performance monitoring wristbands, wearable computing has moved from the realm of science fiction and military application onto the cusp of commonplace consumer technology [1]. With wearables developed primarily for safety as an exception, these devices, however greatly they differ in approach and execution, share one main feature, namely their exclusivity to the wearer. As such they continue a trend already observed within the traditional mobile technologies, that has allowed their users to create a huge amount of data flow that remains imperceptible to those with whom they share space. Aided by their devices, users are paradoxically increasingly interacting and exchanging ever growing volumes of information within their social space yet concurrently increasingly hindered in direct personal engagement [2]. As a result the user will often project an aura of aloof detachment and disengagement from the occupied spatial environment. In this paper we propose an extension of our existing channels of mobile communication into the directly perceivable realm, by developing a visible mode of interaction and exchange of information, facilitated through embedded luminous materials in everyday garments. Inspired by the sophisticated methods of communication deployed some species of fireflies, we created project lightning bug, a light enhanced garment, which can be characterized as ambient, wearable display with networking capabilities. The garment changes the conventional handling of information and thus represents an extension to the usual mobile devices, which are increasingly becoming invisible links or hubs in the chain of communication [3]. For prototyping purp... ... middle of paper ... ...s: augmenting social networks with wearable computers." Pervasive Computing, IEEE 2, no. 1 (2003): 71-78. 3. Ranck, The wearable computing market: a global analysis, 5. 4. Pucci, Emilia Louisa, and Ingrid Mulder. "Agorà 2.0: designing hybrid communities." In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Communities and Technologies, pp. 16-25. ACM, 2013. 5. Iossifova, Milena, and Younghui Kim. "HearWear: the fashion of environmental noise display." In ACM SIGGRAPH 2004 Emerging technologies, p. 7. ACM, 2004. 6. e Silva, Adriana de Souza. "From Cyber to Hybrid Mobile Technologies as Interfaces of Hybrid Spaces." Space and culture 9, no. 3 (2006): 261-278. 7. Howard Rheingold, "Cyborg Swarms and Wearable Communities," The Feature Archives, accessed November 5, 2013, http://www.thefeaturearchives.com/topic/Culture/Cyborg_Swarms_and_Wearable_Communities.html.

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