Monday, February 18, 2002		On Hardware

NAOKI Harasawa is a industrial designer, Michie Sone is a fashion designer. The two have pooled their talents to create a range of wearable personal computers embedded in trendy everyday clothes.

A Pioneer Corp employee shows the latest in Japanese streetwear--a hybrid of fashion and technology that has its roots in "wearable PCs." With the white jacket under development, Japanese electronics maker Pioneer Corp aims to showcase more functions to the heat-proof fabric-like display embedded on the sleeve. — Reuters

This meeting of fashion and electronics, in which Japan is something of a trailblazer, has been dubbed "Media Fashion" by its creators. "From now on the computer will be transformed not only in the respect of appearance in downsizing but also in terms of improving its performance and this leads to the idea of wearable PCs -- media fashion," Michitaka Hirose, professor at Tokyo University's Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, said at a recent press conference.

"It is exactly the same as the change from the Ptolemaic theory to the Copernician theory: a 180 degree difference ..." he said referring to the 16th century theory of astronomy which said the earth revolved around the sun as opposed to the earth being orbited by the sun.

Hirose is himself a collaborator on the 60 million ($ 4,84,000) project run by Sone with technical backing from Japanese consumer electronics company, Pioneer Corp. "It is a three-year project that that has been launched with 100 fashion and textile companies in Gifu prefecture (250 km west of Tokyo), with the governor acting as a kind of tutor," Sone said

The first year up to March next year is given over to detailed studies. In the second year the conclusions will be turned into "media fashion" shows, and by the third year, the emphasis will be on commercialising the fruits of the research.

"For now we are trying to see what kind of portable computer technology we can combine in clothes and are trying to come up with a good design. If your clothes become a kind of interface between your body and the computer, it leaves both hands completely free," Sone pointed out.

The designer insists her vision has nothing in common with the "multi-pocket" IT coat in polyester launched last year by jeans maker Levi's and Dutch electronics giant Philips simply to allow a conventional laptop computer, an MP3 player and a mobile phone to be "worn". Sone's backers, Pioneer was already working on miniaturizing their product range before getting involved in this project.

"As an industrial designer I have a wide range of interests, one of them being fashion. I was thinking [of computers in terms] of something to wear like a watch, something much lighter than actual computers and easy to wear," said Harasawa, a director of Pioneer's development division.

Pioneer has been also working for the last 10 years to develop a new kind of ultra-thin electroluminescent (EL) display screen that would be like electronic paper, according to Harasawa, and could be fitted into a jacket sleeve or the body of a handbag.

"It would be really cool to have a jacket with a display over your heart for example and go dancing at a club while a movie is projected on your jacket," enthused Harasawa. The technology to do so, in the form of the screen known as Yuki EL, is already a reality, but with limitations, said Pioneer engineer Tohru Namiki.

"It is an organic electroluminescent display that can be operated with a low voltage and can easily be applied on clothes. It is not very difficult (to produce), but the battery does not last very long, only 4 hours."

Full-scale production of a glass-plated version of Pioneer's Yuki EL is due to begin next year, but the model using a plastic film screen is still another three to five years away. For now, the screen fitted in one of Sone's coats only has the memory to show a video lasting about three minutes on the screen integrated into the garment. Harasawa though already sees a day when entire computers will no longer need to be carried around, but accessed remotely from the technology embedded in the garments.

— AFP