Wearable Tech: Bridging Realities and Reshaping Experiences
Wearables could enable us to better understand ourselves, connect with others, and experience our shared world.
The most exciting thing about wearable tech is not how we use what we wear — but how we experience the world through what we wear. Wearable tech reshapes our lived realities, not just our daily activities. Moreover, the future is quickly becoming a place where wearable technology is guaranteed to change how others will experience us, too.
“The most exciting thing about wearable tech is not how we use what we wear — but how we experience the world through what we wear.”
Wearable tech (WT) is any type of technology integrated into clothing, accessories, or devices that can be worn or used on the body. WT, much like the current reality of AI, is a rapidly evolving field with the potential to transform how we interact with and experience the world around us and is already revolutionizing a wide range of industries, including health and wellness, luxury, education, athletics, gaming, artistic or aesthetic expression, and extended realities (XR)* like augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR), or virtual reality (VR).
Wearable Technology Disrupting the Marketplace
At first,we may think of the ubiquitous smart watch, iterated on by everyone like Google and Apple or Fitbit (which is now owned by Google) to Garmin and many more. Or we might think of a VR headset like the Meta Quest, Sony Playstation VR2 Core, or even the HTC Vive Pro 2 which boasts a 5K screen and 120Hz refresh rate. And you wouldn’t be wrong — these are wearables that have already established themselves as valuable places in our lives and budgets.
Deloitte Global predicted in 2021 that “320 million consumer health and wellness wearable devices [would] ship worldwide in 2022. By 2024, that figure will likely reach nearly 440 million units as new offerings hit the market and more health care providers become comfortable with using them.”
(Caption) A look at the global health wearables market from Deloitte including the Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR).
In short, WT is here to disrupt the way we think about ourselves and the world around us. It can help us better understand ourselves, connect with others, and learn about our shared world. Of course, WT is not without ethical challenges and social dilemmas. Indeed, it will be critical to ensure this — and all technology — is used in ways that honor our privacy, security, and well-being.
Wearable tech is here to disrupt the way we think about ourselves and the world around us.
The Power of Wearable Technology: Integration
The real power of WT is found in its ability to transcend any single category. For example, the smartwatch is equal parts clock, notification center, health monitor, activity tracker, and weather app as well as an intentionally identifiable and artistic statement. In this way, it’s easy to see that wearables bridge technology and fashion with uncanny ease.
Likewise, a VR headset can be far more than a way to interact with video games. These headsets are used for training medical professionals, enhanced education with translation and human-centered accessibility options, giving real estate tours from across the world, and completely changing how we engage art and entertainment through interactive installations, 3D creations, and collective experiences.
These two examples alone have already influenced social psychologies, global economy, and manufacturing demand, and continue to shape diverse cultural experiences around art, fashion, and education. Additionally, we must also recognize that WT exists within larger contexts such as product design, UI/UX design, sustainability design, and far more.
Emerging Wearable Technologies to Lookout For
These examples are just the beginning. Exciting wearables are currently in development or just becoming available in the real world today, and further transforming our relationship to technology and information.
Smart glasses, similar to their wrist-worn variant, share three core aspects of health, technology, and fashion across a wide variety of tech integration. Some of these wearables, like the Echo Frames from Amazon, are simply merging headphones and prescription glasses into one unified experience.
On the other end of the spectrum, Nreal Air AR Glasses aim to “replace all your screens with one,” with several advanced features like One-touch Immersion Control allowing you to quickly switch between 0%, 35% and 100% “Electrochromic Dimming levels” and multiple display modes featuring spatial display technology — providing the user different options of viewing content on a 330" screen.
Smart textiles is a relatively new group of wearables making progress in the same field. Fiber optic clothing, form-fitting fabrics, and 3DKnITS (Three-dimensional Digital Knitting of Intelligent Textile Sensor) are the latest in precise activity analyzation and fitness biometrics. This is the focus of researchers at the MIT Media Lab and in one instance, their smart clothing could classify the user’s activity on a smart mat (walking, running, doing push-ups, etc.) with 99.6 percent accuracy and could recognize seven yoga poses with 98.7 percent accuracy.
This same collaborative technology is being explored within creative applications such as carpet that could drive “musical notes and soundscapes based on the dancer’s steps, to explore the bidirectional relationship between music and choreography.”
Another example is the Levi’s Trucker Jacket featuring Google’s Project Jacquard — their version of “ambient computing” technology which integrates the rapidly advancing power of AI, the cloud, gestures, and activities. This wearable really pushes the boundaries of what we mean by “form and function.”
The Future of Wearable Technology for Increased Integration
Of course, when it comes to trends, the future of wearable technology might actually be found in the evolution of what it means to “wear” something altogether. In stark contrast to smart glasses or smart screens, some innovators are imagining products that, rather than augmenting and intensifying your screen time, fundamentally eliminates it — while allowing you to bring AI, well, everywhere.
The AI Pin from Humane, Inc. is, in so many words, “a tiny laser projector designed to be clipped to the front of your shirt.” More specifically, it is a wearable device that uses a range of sensors which provides the user with contextual and ambient computer interactions.
The bottom line is that technology is always seeking to become more integrated, which means we can and should expect to see overlap between all manner of combinations for wearables: smart watches that might capture data about our health, clothing that might interpret data from AI-enabled cameras, and VR headsets that might look like an unassuming pair of sunglasses which provides us with real-time data about our surroundings, our friends, or any number of contextualized pieces of information.
The bottom line is that technology is always seeking to become more integrated, which means we can and should expect to see overlap between all manner of combinations for wearables.
In this ever-changing era of wearable technology, one thing remains clear: we are not merely users of this innovation; we are co-creators of a new way to engage information. Wearable tech transcends so many categories and disrupts boundaries between fashion, art, education, health, and perhaps above all, design.
Moreover, wearables could enable us to better understand ourselves, connect with others, and experience our shared world in ways previously unimaginable.
* Extended Realities (XR) is a spectrum of technologies that merge the real and virtual worlds. XR includes AR, MR, VR, and any technology on the virtuality continuum. “Beyond AR vs. VR: What is the Difference between AR vs. MR vs. VR vs. XR?”
