14 DAY TRIAL // Clothing and apparel seem to be a big thing right now, especially when both designers and engineers share the same breeding ground of smart clothes.
Because the modern apparel goes through a very experimental phase right now, when 3D printing and wearable circuits research have become a constant presence in news, Intel decided to take this trend forward and introduce the first processing silicon die, in other words, the brain of probably the first smart clothes in existence.
Apparently, clothes are the next step in „smarting things up,” and the experimental studio Chromat unveiled its Spring/Summer 2016 collection over the weekend, which includes 3D-printed clothes that expand as your adrenaline rises, plus a new sports bra, both powered by Intel’s smallest chip, the low-power base Curie.
Intel makes the first steps in creating smartclothes
The Chromat Adrenaline Dress is a garment built less for function and more for „combat,” so to say. It features 3D-printed panels and an interlinked carbon-fiber network that expands when the wearer’s adrenaline rises, thus being a „mechanically expandable” dress.
What’s interesting is that Intel’s Curie chips serve the vision of the designer perfectly, turning the dress in some set of feathers that expand when the wearer feels threatened or angry. This is done via sensors in the gown and the processor somehow controls the carbon fiber dress' framework.
The Chromat Aeros Sports Bra is helped by an Intel chip to open channels and vents inside it to cool down the body when it senses heat and sweat, this way allowing the wearer’s skin to breathe and let him or her train for longer periods of time.
The new Intel Curie low-power chip is the size of a fingernail and has Bluetooth Low Energy radio, a six-axis sensor with accelerometer and gyroscope, and even 384kB flash memory. Intel plans to turn the Curie in the sports person’s CPU of choice.
