Electronic Fabric
11.09.2013 3:06
Recently there were a lot of news coming in about various companies which claimed that they created prototypes of flexible screens. Apparently, we're pretty close to seeing the first commercial specimens of truly portable gadgets. The portability principle itself does not suggest integration of digital technologies right into your clothes. The concept of smart clothes has been around for a while and dozens of companies all over the world have been working hard to make it happen. However, the implementation of this concept is running against yet unmanageable tech roadblocks and the most challenging task so far has been securing the small size of a gadget and the high capacity of an energy source. One of the possible solutions may be a fabric that generates and stores electricity all by itself.
Why do we need this?
The Chinese made it their mission to literally transform clothing into a solar cell battery. More to that, it has to be a battery which points everywhere at the same time, has no relative weight (anyway we have our clothes on), is less fragile in comparison with conventional silica-covered batteries, and last but not the least, it has to be able to store electricity. No doubt, clothes like these will be useful to everyone.
Integration of a mobile PC with the GSM module into a jacket made of electrogenerating fabric will let us—having proper illumination—forget about charging devices once and for all. Nowadays' iPhones and iPads will then become a remnant as ridiculous as payphone booths you can still sometimes see outside. Let's now get a glimpse at what might happen after that: furthering of the miniaturization of gadgets will be followed by large-scale commercial implanting of various devices. That's exactly where the issue of power supply comes before us at a completely different angle. It's not about the battery capacity, but about a yet unknown way of how these batteries are going to work. At the outset usage of electrogenerating clothes for the power supply of implants may get to be the only possible way-out.
The military will be much luckier if compared with civilians. Currently a state-of-the-art military outfit presupposes carrying up to 6 kilos of batteries used by a portable PC, radio station, night-vision device, laser target marker, and flashlight. That said, the actual battery lifetime of all of these gadgets is not that long. Just imagine the scope of capabilities of a military man who will be wearing this kind of self-charging outfit alongside with a flexible, damage-proof PC, which is going to transfer the soldier location data to his commanding officer. Drone controlling supervisors will be able to monitor the location of friendly troops, which will substantially improve their efficiency and lower the friendly fire casualty rate. There you go, it's just exactly the same guidelines that work in today's strategy PC games, but happening in real life (howdy, StarCraft and Command & Conquer fans!).
A more distant future will most probably bring us clothes made of optic fibre that will make it possible to go almost transparent by using the optic camouflage concept. Do you remember glorious Ghost in the Shell anime series where the main character's outfit went glassy and made her almost invisible? Let alone anime, it's a sure thing everyone watched Predator starring Arnold Schwarzenegger whose transparent camouflage just knocked you out. But the best thing ever is that currently there are a lot of R&D people working on this concept and we can already see the first yields these efforts are bringing about.
Source: http://habrahabr.ru/post/192392/
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