Hasta La Gadget!

Next time you compliment a woman at a party that’s she glowing, it may literally be so. Two London-based designers have created a dress embroidered with 24,000 full color LEDs .

Called the ‘Galaxy Dress’ it claims to be the largest wearable display in the world  and will be the center piece of an exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.

“We used the smallest full-color LEDs, flat like paper, and measuring only 2 by 2 mm,” say designers Francesca Rosella and Ryan Genz in an email. “The circuits are extra-thin, flexible, and hand embroidered on a layer of silk in a way that gives it stretch so the LED fabric can move like normal fabric with lightness and fluidity.” The duo run an interactive clothing company called CuteCircuit.

Beyond the LEDs themselves, the Galaxy Dress is crafted in a way that should make the pickiest seamstresses proud.

To diffuse the LED light, the dress has four layers of silk chiffon and a pleated silk organza crinoline skirt. The extra-thin electronics allows the dress to follow the body shape closely like with normal fabric.

Instead of having one large and heavy battery, the dress is designed to run on many tiny iPod batteries hiding in the crinoline, says Rosella. “They are not visible or uncomfortable,” she says.

With the batteries, the Galaxy Dress wearer can walk around–all lit up–for anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour.

The areas without LEDs are decorated with more than 4000 hand-applied Swarovski crystals that range from clear crystal to bright pink.  “The dress looks good even when it is switched off,” say the designers.

So far, the dress hasn’t been worn by any real woman. It went straight from the fittings model to the museum.

More photos and a video of the dress

See a video of the LED Dress that, according to the designers, consumes about the same electricity as two household bulbs.

Photos: J.B. Spector/the Museum of Science and Industry.

The past decade’s march towards better gadgets shows a trend line pointing towards ultra powerful gadgets with UIs so seamless, they make Macs look like a punchcard computers. But if you think about it, we—not hardware—are the limitation.

Besides processing power, price and battery life improvements, our preferences for gadgets and the direction of those desires point towards three things: Richer displays, more seamless inputs and smaller packages—the first two being in direct conflict with the last. Looking at where we’ve been and where we are, I don’t think we can keep pursuing these goals without going gadget prosthetic.

Now here’s a trip: For the first time, this decade, design choices are being made to limit resolution in screens to show mercy to the human eye. Apple’s recent iMac revision increased the desktop monitor’s pixels per inch rating to about 110. That’s the equivalent of a laptop levels of density, but on a big 27-inch screen, and it was so sharp, it hurt. Any desk jockey can tell you that as displays get sharper, the strain goes up. On mobiles, which are already the most pixel dense of the gadget kingdom, designers are frequently bashing into conflicting goals of fitting lots of pixels onto pocketable devices. Resolution-independent operating systems (that rely on vector-based graphics) are important but if we don’t take displays inside the human body, gadgets can’t get much smaller—there’s no way for them to become as pixel rich as desktops while continuing to get smaller than they already are.

The the idea for hybridized HUDs featuring reality and computed interfaces has been around for ages. Science fiction has already dreamed up what it is we want to see in animations like Ghost in the Shell. But the recent explosion of augmented reality apps—powered by smartphones with directional compasses, internet connections, location awareness, cameras and the power to draw data driven overlays—are simply prototypes for real HUD and in-eye/mind displays. It’s not a conceptual problem as much as it is a question of how.

Keyboards and buttons are easier to understand as a limitation, as we type on increasingly baby-finger sized keyboards on smartphones with appendages that look like hot dogs. Keyboards just need to go away. Towards that trend, software keyboards may be error prone but when used by the proficient, the typing is way faster and the devices are way smaller. Further away from traditional keyboards, Microsoft Research’s projects point towards gesture and voice commands. I don’t see how we could get full work days done that way, though, and there’s the rub. There’s not even a good concept for controlling a PC to the level we need to without keyboards and pointers now. Mind control is a joke.

In user-interface design, we’ve always trended towards the invisible. Instead of seams, we want the seamless. Instead of four clicks, any given major task is better with three. Maybe one day, none—the blink of an eye. Funny enough, the only mentally controlled gadgets these days are toys. And usually the low-end QVC valley where high-end tech ends up after dripping down from the peak of military or space program development to gadget fiends, and finally their kids. I would guess the sloppy capabilities of such toys, like the Mindflex Brainwave, make it inappropriate, unsafe and unusable for anything but hovering a ball in mid air.

It’s funny looking back at attempts of strap-on computing. We always thought these clunky setups—”wearable” PCs velcro’d to our arms or slung over our backs—were the predecessors to in-body computing. I’ve long assumed that getting to prosthetic gadgets was an issue of micronization. “When we can fit a computer into the profile of a Bluetooth headset, people will use ’em,” we thought. But it’s clear to me that it’s about the interface; the inputs and outputs.

Gadgets don’t have much more room for revolutionary improvement unless we bypass our own natural limitations of fingers meant to peel bananas and eyes designed to spot prey and predators, and get these damn things we love and depend on so much routed directly into our brains.

This week, Gizmodo is exploring the enhanced human future in a segment we call This Cyborg Life. It’s about what happens when we treat our body less as a sacred object and more as what it is: Nature’s ultimate machine.

[Image from Stuart Moore]

Apple 30-inch Cinema Display: $1,800. Apple iMac, with 27-inch display: $1,700. If you’re having trouble with those numbers, it means that if you can give up just three diagonal inches (and remember, it’s not the size but what you do with it that counts) then you can save $100, and Apple will effectively throw in a free computer.

It’s true that the Cinema Display is slightly more cinematic, with a vertical pixel count of 1,600 versus the iMac’s 1,440, but both have the same horizontal resolution of 2,560 pixels, which means you don’t get to fit much more on the bigger monitor.

Add to this the iMac’s killer feature: The screen can be used as a display for another computer using an optional DisplayPort adapter (DisplayPort is a two-way interface). This means that, a few years down the line when you have convinced yourself your computer is too slow, you’ll still have a great TV.

And make no mistake. From the splash page featuring the Star Trek graphic above to the VESA-compatible mount to the heavy emphasis on contrast ratios and viewing angle show you that Apple wants you to toss your telly and put this in the living room instead. The new iMac, it seems, is also the new Apple TV.

Product page [Apple]

Innovating is hard! But there’s one trick that can pull any engineer right out of that rut: the extra display. Here are eight of the most surprising, audacious, and weird places ever to be graced with a display panel.

Nothing is immune, be it cameras, laptops, game controllers or ebook readers, and the trend is showing no signs of stopping. The consumer electronics industry, it seems, is slowly become one big episode of Pimp My Ride. Anyway, on with the screens.

An ill-timed half-step in the generational console wars, the Sega Dreamcast is remembered primarily as a failure. But for the purposes of this list, we’ll rosily remember it as the first console to include displays in its controller. Strictly speaking, the “display” was one of the functions of the Visual Memory System cartridges, which each contained its own processor, memory, battery and, of course, 48×32 monochrome panel. Despite some genuinely OK uses—keeping certain controls secret during multiplayer games, or displaying FPS stats—the hardware couldn’t really do the concept justice. [Pic via Axess]

When switched off, Samsung’s TL220 and TL225 point-and-shoots look like any other boring camera. Switched on, they still look like any other boring camera, except for an odd-looking, forward-facing second display. Samsung’s advertising angle is all about MySpace-style self-portraiture and making babies smile with horrifying clown animations, but the visual countdown timer is the only feature I think I’d ever end up appreciating.

Every stumble Barnes & Noble’s eReader takes into the limlight reveals something stranger. First, we find out it’ll run Android, a smartphone OS. Then we discover it’s going to have two screens—a traditional E-ink display up top, and a multitouch LCD down below. There’s no denying this makes for some great gadget porn, but we’ll have to wait until tomorrow to find out if it’s a good idea, because really, that’s not at all clear.

Nintendo’s entire DS pitch was about the second display, which was intended mainly as a touchscreen control interface. Early reviewers didn’t really know what to make of it. Now, reviewers take Nintendo’s two-screened style for granted.

The Eee Keyboard looks more like a one-off Ben Heck mod than it does a real product—a theory almost supported by its endlessly creeping release date. Today, units are about ready to ship, meaning that you’ll be able to buy a QWERTY keyboard with a full-fledged computer in it, and a secondary touchscreen display crammed into the right-hand side.

Lenovo’s ThinkPad W700ds captures the spirit of the extraneous second screen perfectly. One second you’re just tapping away at your big, bland, work-issued laptop, then BAM! A secret monitor pops out of the side of your main screen. This is pure Inspector Gadget, right here. And man, the pitch for this thing over at Lenovo HQ must’ve been utterly spectacular. Thanks, namely Lenovo engineer! I hope this worked out for you.

Lenovo’s secondary displays are covert; you know, hush hush. Sharp’s, on the other hand, are out ‘n’ proud—in fact, Sharp’s Mebius NJ70A carries its extra pixels right in the middle of its face, where you’d normally find a trackpad. Actually, this multitouch capacitive display is the trackpad.

The first generation of OLPC hardware was, despite some interesting flourishes, pure laptop. The first few generations of tablets PCs were nothing more than notebooks with an extra hinge. The next take on both concepts, the XO 2 and Microsoft’s Courier, respectively, took everyone by surprise by killing keyboards in favor of displays. Neither is available yet, so the jury is out—way out—on whether or not our future has two screens, or just one.

Japanese company QD Laser has apparently developed a green laser which could up the ante in the HD pico projector market. The laser — which is just 5.6mm in diameter and outputs a 532 nanometer, pure green light — was shown off as a working prototype at CEATEC. QD says their green laser (the hardest type to make) will be well-suited to gadgets like cellphones and laptops because of its low power consumption and wide operating temperature. Mass production is seemingly planned for next year, with the hopes that each little laser will run $10, cheaper than the one currently available, which is manufactured by Corning. You know what we always say: rave on.

Filed under: Displays

Green laser for microprojectors developed, microraves soon to follow originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 12 Oct 2009 20:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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