Ping – Gesture-aware clothing for the social media butterfly?

Wednesday, April 21st, 2010 in: Current Events, News

I’m tired of writing about myself. Let’s talk about something interesting!

This pretty model is showing off Ping, a clothing concept that incorporates the Arduino Lilypad platform to make automatic twitter updates based on your motions. Sensors are woven into the fabric to detect certain gestures, and can also mimic the sensation of being tapped on the shoulder when someone is trying to contact you.

From the creator’s blurb:

Ping is a garment that connects to your Facebook account wirelessly and from anywhere. It allows you to stay connected to your friends and groups of friends simply by performing natural gestures that are built into the mechanics of the garments we wear. Lift up a hood, tie a bow, zip, button, and simply move, bend and swing to ping your friends naturally and automatically. No phone, no laptop, no hardware. Simply go about your day, look good and stay connected.

Very few wearable technology projects successfully target consumers outside of the sports, medical and military fields. We are just not there yet. The project aims to generate market desirability for a wide variety of people to use in everyday life.

Wait a second… technology that can not only detect and identify specific gestures, but also provide tactile response… and you’re trying to market it as an automatic twitter updater? Talk about a lack of imagination. Something tells me this was a fashion designer’s school project. The focus is purely on concept and aesthetic, form and function with such a limited vision for application! So much more could be done with this technology than give emaciated models the ability to tweet “I’m putting my hood on now.”

If I were a prison warden, I would put all my inmates in this stuff. Gesture-aware clothing could tell me when inmates are doing naughty things they shouldn’t, like fighting, taking drugs, fashioning a shiv or shoving things up their rectum. This kind of thing serves an Orwellian system very nicely. A private school headmaster’s wet dream.

It could help rescue operations for things like earthquakes, letting them know who is trapped where and whether they’re moving or not. Stick a GPS beacon into them and it’s a great accessory for backwoods snowboarders or mountain climbers in case they get lost.

That’s just the steam that came off my brain when I thought of the words “gesture-aware clothing,” Give me a million dollars and 3 months and I could make this into something real. The creator is onto something, they just don’t know what it is yet.

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