Tag: wearable tech

Wearable technology will become a new dedicated division at Burberry

| October 10, 2014

A growing number of successful American consumer companies are now looking to wearables for their future.

Some of the biggest and most celebrated businesses in the United States have now added a division of some form that is dedicated to looking into how wearable technology and other trends will affect them.

Burberry has now created its own innovation group that they have called the What If Group.

Christopher Bailey, Chief Creative and CEO at Burberry, stated that this business has assembled the What If Group in order to consider the way that tech and fashion can come together. This includes thoughts about wearable technology, such as if tech could be brought directly into a garment’s fibers or adding chips to a fashion accessory. At the time that this article was written, Bailey had not elaborated much more in terms of the details of their intentions, but a company representative shared a little bit more.

This group that is considering different possibilities for wearable technology has a range of different recruits.

Wearable Technology and Fashion - BurberryThe company rep explained that the members of the group are from all across the company. They assemble once every month in order to discuss areas in which there will be trends in retail, fashion, and technology separately or when brought together. The goal of these meetings is to be able to come up with innovative new ideas that may one day be offered to the company’s customers.

This is not the first time that the company has dabbled with wearable tech. In fact, in 2012, it attached RFID chips to some of its accessories. This way, when shoppers at the Regent Street flagship store of Burberry in London stepped near certain fitting room screens, specific content (such as some information about the materials that were used to create a certain bag, or a video that demonstrates the way in which a skirt was worn on a model that walked a fashion show runway) was displayed.

However, Bailey indicated that the company may now be looking to wearable technology more closely, examining certain devices such as the Opening Ceremony bracelet from Intel, or the “biometric” fabrics from Ralph Lauren.

Smart glasses from Toshiba take a different design track

| October 10, 2014

The brand has decided not to use the over-the lens prism that was selected for Google Glass.

The latest brand to have their eye – so to speak – on the smart glasses market appears to be Toshiba, which has just finished revealing their prototype in Japan at the Ceatec trade show.

While these wearables may not be ready to bump Google Glass out of the running, price may be in their favor.

So far, it looks as though the smart glasses that could be offered by Toshiba would be a bit more affordable than Google Glass, which comes with a hefty price tag, at the moment. They are currently calling this wearable technology device Toshiba Glass. While they do include a built-in projector, they are unlike the current front runner in this category in that the image that they display is simply reflected off the inside of the lens in order to provide the wearer with a kind of augmented reality display experience.

This makes the idea similar to Google’s smart glasses, but at the same time, they are rather different.

Smart Glasses - ToshibaThe Toshiba wearables feature a lightweight, small projector that is clipped onto one of the arms of the eyewear, close to the lens. It is that projector that reflects the image off the lens for the viewer to see in augmented reality. Google’s option also uses a projector, but its design is different in that it uses a prism over the lens in order to reflect the projected image to be seen by the wearer’s eye.

The product from Toshiba skips the use of the prism and has constructed the lens, itself, to be made up of a series of slim vertical prisms that are essentially invisible while looking directly through the lens as you would as you went about your daily routines. However, it allows an image to be projected upon them from an angle so that the wearer will be able to see it.

The specs from the company state that the device, as a whole, weighs about the same as Google Glass, at 42 grams. That said, they aren’t quite up to that level, particularly in that they are not wireless, as a battery in the projector would make the weight too high.