How would you feel if the passwords you used were stored on your t-shirt? Dress with an electronic screen that you can check through your smartphone? Yes there are clothes made with photoluminescent yarns and built-in eye-tracking technology activated by the world's looks!
We are talking about smart fabrics. The following video presents you with a fabric that changes structure via tiny electric motors activated by light sensors sewn throughout the garment.
What about the passwords mentioned in the title?
Researchers from the University of Washington, announced last weekteam that they were able to successfully manage the polarity of the magnetized fabric. Using conductive yarn they created fabrics and fashion accessories that can store digital data or visual information.
As the researchers say, the conductive yarn is already in use to create garments or accessories that light up or communicate.
However, as mentioned above, UW researchers have realized that the ferromagnetic properties of the yarn could also be used to store data or visual information. So letters or numbers can be read by a magnetometer: a cheap instrument that measures the direction and strength of magnetic fields and is embedded in most smartphones.
So think about passwords that can be stored on a comeye of conductive fabric sewn into a blouse. It is one of many projects reported by the researchers.
By using the conductive thread the integration of passwords can be done without electronic systems or sensors. Shyam Gollakota, associate professor at the Paul G. Allen School of Desktop UW Science and Engineering reports:
We use something that already exists on a smartphone and uses almost no energy, so the cost of reading this type of data is negligible.
A paper (PDF) for the data weaving experiment, titled "Data Storage and Interaction using Magnetized Fabric," was presented last week in Quebec at the Association for Computing Machinery's User Interface Software and Technology Symposium .
The researchers used everyday sewing machines to enrich regular fabric with yarn, creating "patches" that could be turned into garlands, belts, bracelets, necklaces or anywhere else.
Watch the video
