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Technological Apparel

Technological clothing is apparel that integrates technology into wearable clothing. Advancements in this field have been growing in both the retail and science industries. Technology advances have led to LED screens, sensors, and nanotechnology embedded into apparel. People can do everything from give a hug from thousands of miles away to give the illusion of invisibility.

T-Shirt OS

One example of wearable technology is the T-shirt OS, which is “the world's first digital t-shirt.” Not yet created, but an idea as of 2012, plans to let people express who they are and with a digital T-shirt changing all the time. Teaming up together, Cute Circuit and Ballentine's are creating the T-Shirt OS using wearable LED screen in the fabric including a camera, microphone, accelerometer and speakers for sound.

The T-Shirt OS will be created using a large LED screen in the fabric that includes a camera, microphone, accelerometer and speakers for sound. LED means “light-emitting diode”. This means that the diode is “turned on” and the electrons are able to recombine with the electron giving them energy in the form of light and color. LED lights cost less to maintain and last longer than an average light bulb. This helps with the T-shirt to have a long life but also have a brighter, more noticeable lighting. LED lights can be compacted into small surfaces like when used to intertwine with the T-Shirt OS. The T-Shirt will be connected to larger processors such as the consumer's cell phone since the shirt is targeted to be “wearable, shareable, and programmable.” This means, one would be able to show twitter posts, Facebook updates, photos, play your music, and take photos wherever you go. Currently, the shirt is being controlled using iOS technology. There are problems that the manufactures have run into, one of which is how consumers will wash the product.

IOS technology is what is found in the current Apple products. It “manages the devices hardware and provides technologies required to implement native applications. The operating system also chips with various system applications, such as Phone, Mails and Safari, that provide standard system services to the user.”

The Hug Shirt

The Hug Shirt is embedded with sensors that feel the strength of the touch, the skin warmth and the heartbeat rate of the sender. The Hug Shirt is a Bluetooth accessory. The Hug Shirts do not have an assigned phone number. All of the data goes from the sensors Bluetooth to your mobile phone, delivers the hug data to your friend's phone and it is transmitted Bluetooth to his/her shirt. If one party does not own a Hug Shirt, he or she can still send a hug using software called HugMe. You will be able to send hugs while you are on the move in the same way and to the same places you are able to make phone calls.

Smart Fabrics and Interactive Textiles (SFITs) are made by weaving new conductive materials into fabrics, which turns them into sensors and electrical conduits. Smart Fabrics and Interactive Textiles clothing would consist of circuits and sensors that provide all of the typical electronics we carry around today, like mobile phones.

The Invisibility Cloak

Engineers and researchers are beginning to understand new nanotechnology of light, and how to use that information to make objects appear invisible. Nanotechnology is the influence of matter at an atomic and molecular scale. “A nanometer is one billionth of a meter”. Humans are able to see objects because they reflect or refract the spectrum of lights. However, visible light is just one of many forms of electromagnetic radiation. The technology of invisibility “alters how things interact with all electromagnetic waves”. Many researchers are fabricating materials that will bend these electromagnetic waves around an object, using nanotechnology because they have to manipulate electromagnetic waves.

A Duke University professor, David R. Smith, led a team to make the first demonstration model in 2006. “Their device was composed of copper loops arrayed on a fiberglass board about five inches across. It could only hide an object in a single microwave frequency.”

Xiang Zhang led researchers at the University of California at Berkeley to produce an “experimental mesh”. The mesh could reverse the direction of visible and near-infrared light. Their experimental mesh was created by arranging a million wires into a tiny mat of metamaterial. Each wire was a 100 times finer than a human hair (100,000 nanometers).

Most recently, David R. Smith and his colleagues at Southeast University in Nanjing, China, presented a flexible sheet that can give the illusion of invisibility in several microwave frequencies, when viewed at a specific angle. This sheet was created by assembling “10,000 separate elements on a copper-clad circuit board 19 inches long and four inches wide. Each one acts as an electromagnetic rudder to steer microwaves around an object placed under the mat.”

However, researchers at the Singapore MIT Alliance for Research and Technology have developed an invisibility cloak without the use of nanotechnology. They’ve created the illusion of invisibility by gluing two pieces of calcite together at different optical paths. Calcite is a carbonate mineral that has the property to capitalize on optical anisotropy, which is the ability to bend light rays.

Nanotechnology has also generated more advancements in textiles, such as smart fabrics. On September 14, 2010, Professor Juan Hinestroza gave a presentation on the use of biochemistry to fashion articles of nanoparticle-treated clothing. Hinestroza’s work shows the prospect of a fabric that will be able to kill bacteria, monitor temperature, and lessen the effects of UV radiation. This fabric would be created through a “selectively permeable layer of nanoparticles” acting like a cell membrane.

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