It’s only a matter of time before fashion and tech fully collide. It’s not enough that we now like to buy our clothes on the internet — companies like Google and Nike and Fitbit are determined to make us strap technology onto our faces and arms.
But it stretches beyond even that.
A new phenomenon I’ve noticed lately is the idea of LED-lit clothing, including Adafruit’s build-your-own ties and shoes and ThinkGeek’s Wifi Shirt.
A new Kickstarter project, Fos, is looking for funding to do the same thing with a focus on athletes.
Fos is an LED-illuminated patch of cloth that can be stuck onto other items of clothing, like a jacket or shirt.
Users can program their Fos to display calories burned, how close you are to your goal, etc. Users can even use Fos’ demo application to choose specific graphics or video to display on the 60fps LED patch with 64,000 shades of light. According to the creators, it weighs less than a golf ball.
The idea is not only to look super cool (and trust me, nothing is cooler than electronic clothing), but to stay safe when working out in urban areas. However, founder Anders Nelson admits in his Kickstarter video that it’s not only for the Urban athlete.
The Fos is also for the party animal raver inside all of us. In fact, DJs can even decide to push out custom-tailored graphics to all the Fos bodies in the room to make one giant human light installation. But first, of course, the Fos needs to hit the mainstream.
And before that can happen, Fos needs to reach its $200,000 funding goal on Kickstarter in the next four weeks.
