Social Textiles: MIT invents a wearable social network
mis à jour le 6 October 2015 à 23:16
Ever wondered what it would be like to meet someone and immediately know everything essential about them? Well, now you probably can with this T-shirt.
When it comes to socialising on the web, we do so easily with the proliferation of social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram but when it comes to real-life interactions, those networks don’t help one bit.
So, how can technology make social media more tangible? What if we could wear our social networks? Would it improve our real-life connections?
For that we got our answers from Social Textiles, a project set up by a group of MIT students - Viirj Kan, Katsuya Fujii, Judith Amores, and Chang Long Zhu Jin— in collaboration with designers of Fluid Interface Group and researchers from MIT’s Tangible Media Group.
Social Textiles offers T-shirts (but it could be any other type of clothing) on which a pattern is printed using thermochromatic ink, and with a thin circuit membrane underneath. Paired with your smartphone via Bluetooth, the social T-shirt detects when people who share your interests are nearby and buzzes you through the shirt’s collar when you are within 12 feet of each other (providing both of you are wearing the T-shirt).
And that’s not all. If you touch the person by high-fiving, shaking hands or just by skimming their shoulder, the T-shirt sensor lights up, displaying symbols on the front of the shirt that highlight your common interests, past schools, music tastes or even if you are compatible organ donors.
“Depending on how the ink pattern is designed, Social Textiles can communicate anything you want… It could tell two people who have just met that they both like jazz, or that they both go to MIT”, Kan explains. For example, when two members of the Social Textiles Group demonstrated the technology by high-fiving each other, the letters “MIT” appeared on their shirts.
We know that clothes say a lot about who we are, but with this ingenious socialising idea, the statement becomes entirely literal!
For more information on the Social Textiles project, head here.
Lindsay POUI-DI
