How would you feel if the passwords you use were stored on your T-shirt? A dress with an electronic screen that you can control via your smartphone? Yes, there are clothes made with photoluminescent threads and built-in eye tracking technology that is activated by people's gazes!
We're talking about smart fabrics. The video below shows you a fabric that changes structure through tiny electric motors activated by light sensors sewn throughout the garment.
But what about the passwords mentioned in the title?
Researchers at the University of Washington announced last week that they had successfully manipulated the polarity of magnetized fabric. Using conductive yarn, they created fabrics and fashion accessories that can store digital data or visual information.
As the researchers report, conductive thread is already being used to create clothing or accessories that light up or communicate.
But as mentioned above, the UW researchers realized that the filament's ferromagnetic properties could also be used to store data or visual information. So letters or numbers could be read with a magnetometer: a cheap instrument that measures the direction and strength of magnetic fields and is built into most smartphones.
So think of passwords that could be stored on a piece of conductive fabric sewn onto a t-shirt. It's one of many projects the researchers are reporting.
Using conductive thread, the integration of passwords can be done without electronics or sensors. Shyam Gollakota, an associate professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at UW, says:
We are using 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) about the data weaving experiment, titled “Data Storage and Interaction using Magnetized Fabric,” was presented last week in Quebec, 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 the thread, creating "patches" that could be turned into ties, belts, bracelets, necklaces or anywhere else.
Watch the video
