WEARABLE TECH

WALKING AND TALKING TECH

Wearable tech has become increasingly popular over the past few years, but the basic idea is nothing new. Simply put, wearable tech is a general term for a group of devices — including fitness trackers, smartwatches, smart glasses and safety wearables, that are designed to be worn throughout the day. Today’s wearables can connect with your existing devices, like computers and smartphones, which means they can do a lot of cool stuff.

However, wearable tech is not for everyone, well… yet! I mean this in two senses. 1. Not everyone wants to be that connected and 2. Over zealous large corporations thinking everyone wants, and is ready to be that connected. But having said that, these large corporations are often the ones that get the balls rolling, successful or not. And frankly, innovation often requires failure along the way — leading to the very breakthroughs that can be deemed giant successes. Right, so let’s quickly have a little look at the Google Glass innovation fiasco.

Glass was first announced in 2012 and made available (for $1,500 USD) to select early adopters (dubbed “Glass explorers”) in 2013. It went on sale to the general public in May 2014. In technical terms, it was an amazing piece of miniaturisation. Driven by voice commands, it had quite impressive functionality. You could tell it to take a photograph, for example, or record a video of what you were looking at. Similarly, you could call up a Google search about something you were looking at and have the results displayed in surprisingly readable form on the tiny screen — which appeared to be suspended some distance ahead of you in space. In that sense, Glass looked like the realisation of a dream that early tech visionaries like Douglas Engelbart had — of technology that could usefully augment human capabilities with computing power.

There were just two problems with Glass. The first is that it made you look like a mega dork, even though they teamed up with the company that made Ray-Bans. The second problem was the nail in the coffin: Glass made everyone around you feel uneasy. They thought the technology was creepy, intrusive and privacy-destroying. In the end, Google bit the bullet and withdrew the product in January 2015.

But Google Glass could be making a comeback. One day…

So clearly some wearble tech experts haven’t exactly had their finest couple of years, but technology can’t stop, won’t stop! Check out this list of 50 Wearable Tech Gamechangers from last year. How many were/are you aware of? And jump over to Wareable for more reassurance that wearable tech is alive and well.

When it comes to a vision for wearable tech, Studio XO sees things a bit differently to any other company out there. Operating at the “intersection of science, technology, fashion and music”, founders Nancy Tilbury and Ben Males are busy merging the different creative fields, creating a brand new discipline: wearable tech. Though in theory, and in different guises, the concept has been around for quite some time, it’s only now — with Studio XO as flag bearers — that the idea has reached a mainstream audience. In the case of Studio XO, the message has been communicated with the help of world-famous pop stars. Over the last three years, Nancy and Ben have worked with stage artists like Lady Gaga, Azealia Banks and Black Eyed Peas, to mention but a few.

So yeah, we think it’s pretty safe to say that the XO Studio crew is changing not only the way we wear clothes, but also how we define the purpose of fashion.

Going forward, Studio XO plans on taking their ideas beyond the stage and to the general public. “We want to move on from couture to ready-to-wear, looking at how we can take our couture from the stage and launching it as more mass products. That’s what you’ll see from a company like ours over the course of the next couple of years,” Ben says. Nancy agrees. “Yes, the X and O is our identity and it’s starting to take shape. And it’s really interesting to watch that evolve; the digital space is inspiring what we do in the physical space. In the course of the next year we are going to design and render some of these pieces that will be more of a focal point for fashion people to grasp onto.” Whatever the future holds, be sure that XO Studio will be on the barricades, wielding both sewing machines and computers.

THE NEXT BLACK

The Next Black is a documentary from 2014 (still soooo relevant) that brings together designers, innovators and leaders from around the globe for an open discussion on the concept of clothing. It probes beyond what we are wearing to explore how we produce clothes, how we interact with them and how we care for them. Each person we interviewed has a fresh perspective on the future of the clothing industry — and all of them are using their passions to fuel change.

The Next Black aims to deepen our understanding of what people will be wearing and washing — today and tomorrow. They’ve taken a look at how evolving textiles and technologies are affecting the creation of clothing, as well as how growing concerns about sustainability are transforming the way we do laundry.

RESOURCES: Port Magazine Wired AEG

Originally published at VISIONAIRE.