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Wearable technology is taking a pretty interesting turn. Smartwatches and earbuds and glasses be damned: shirts and jackets with their own touch controllers and, now, displays, are ahead.
Two teams of researchers teamed up to figure out how they can leverage the flexibility of OLED technology to marriage the display and the ugly Christmas sweater. Their goal was to find a way to make a fabric-like material which can house the elements needed for a display to live on, while at the same time being durable and flexible enough to be stretched like real fabric.
Finding a new technique for such an application was necessary because the flexible OLED panels of today aren’t fit for open-body wearing. The technology is still flimsy in terms of durability, though to Samsung and LG’s credit (the two biggest companies looking to bring in the new technology) they probably never intended for OLED technology to be used in this manner.
We’re not sure what, exactly, you could or would want to do with an OLED-equipped article of clothing. Our first exciting thought is to turn that ugly Christmas sweater into something much better. Or perhaps a display on the sleeve of your jacket could act as a notification window for your phone. Maybe even with Project Jacquard’s touch-enabled fabric and an embedded chipset, you could control your phone from that jacket.
The possibilities seem endless and exciting, but we obviously don’t want to get too far ahead of ourselves as there’s likely to be a lot of maturation required before we see anything concrete.
[via Business Korea]
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