DailyDirt: Wearing Technology On Your Sleeve (Or In Your Brain)

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Fri, Mar 25th 2011 5:00pm — Michael Ho

Technology gets smaller and smaller and ever more personalized as it matures. Computers used to fill entire rooms (and they still can...), but it's far more common for powerful computational devices to be able to fit in a pocket. Curiously, though, wearing gadgets seems to still be largely restricted to wristwatches. Maybe that'll change, and we'll actually get computers in our shoes someday. We'd love to see more examples, so here are a few links on some technology that we might wear in the future.

BMW sponsored a bunch of "urban transportation concepts" for wearable personal transportation. But a lot of these designs look much less useful than a Segway. [url]
Really small supercapacitors grown on fibers could create a variety of textiles that could act like batteries. We probably won't be wearing batteries anytime soon, but flexible batteries might be useful. [url]
A paralyzed woman has learned to control a BrainGate implant and has used it as a computer input device for over 1,000 days. She can perform "point and click" actions with >90% accuracy. [url]
To discover more interesting tech-related content, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: hmi, supercapacitors, wearable
Companies: bmw, briangate, segway