Intel has a problem. Hell, the entire computer industry has a problem: It’s woefully unhip.
Bill Gates, bless his brilliant mind, helped form an image in America’s collective unconscious of what programmers should look like, a mental picture hasn’t shifted from the pocket protector despite the fact that most modern tech CEOs dress like ordinary folks — think Mr. Roger Federer, not Mr. Rogers.
Still, gadgets are for geeks … right? Not so fast, explains Intel.
“Tech and fashion are really at the heart of modern culture,” said Sandra Lopez, vice president of Intel’s new devices group. Tech touches all of our lives, everything we do during every minute of every day, she told Digital Trends. How best to convey that? “How do you bring the ecosystem together, specifically fashion and technology? It’s about the combination, the blend of style, function, and form.”
At an event at New York Fashion week, Lopez and her team set out to showcase what’s possible when fashion and tech collide. Along the way they set out to highlight the power of Intel’s Curie module, a system-on-a-chip, or all-in-one embed module with memory, processors, sensors and all, that’s little bigger than the eraser on a pencil.
On the runway, Intel showed off a fresh collaboration with Becca McCharen, founder of the design house Chromat. Chromat’s models walked the runway in the Lumina collection, inspired by color theory and bioluminescence. Thanks to hand wraps that integrate Intel’s chips — they look sort of like the protective sleeve an archer would wear — the model’s dresses glow and change color, a reaction to the movements of the model’s hands. Algorithms control the exact nature of the glow response, Lopez explained: “A lot of this stuff is being worked on real time.” Last year at Fashion Week, Chromat showed a Curie-powered dress that expands into a menacing shape when the module senses adrenaline, to mimic a living creature’s fight-or-flight response.
Off the runway, select fashion influencers will sport pins adorned with emoji — unicorns, diamonds and so on — that track location, step counts, movement, and more, thanks to accelerometers and gyroscopes in the Curie chips.
“Consumers want to know a day in the life of a fashion influencer. There’s a preconceived notion that it’s a glamorous life, but in reality they’re running from show to show to show,” Lopez said.
Pins are hot now in the fashion industry, as are emojis. Coupling the two trends with new functionality, marrying them, brings meaningful new context, she said.
Like the bizarre garments we see on runways, none of which are actual products a consumer might wear, Intel’s designs are more proof of concept than finished product – designed to inspire and show what’s possible, Lopez said. The company will highlight new partners in the future, however, to show even more ways that eraser-sized silicon chip can transform fashion and culture.
“It’s a brain. It’s a mini computer. The possibilities are endless.”
The OnePlus Buds Clip are a new pair of open-ear earbuds built around a simple convenience. They join Sony’s LinkBuds Clip in the growing ear-cuff category, but either OnePlus bud can go on either ear.
Sensors recognize how the earbuds are being worn and route the audio channels accordingly. There’s no label to check before putting them on, and the feature also works when only one bud is used.
We buy fitness bands and activity trackers to keep tabs on our exercise, but it is easy to forget to start tracking or switch modes when moving between different activities. For Fitbit and Pixel Watch users, that could soon become a lot less annoying, as Google is rolling out a major upgrade to automatic activity tracking that can recognize more than 100 types of exercise, up from just 10 before.
Google first showed off the improved tracking earlier this month alongside the Fitbit Edge. It is now coming to Fitbit Air and the Pixel Watch 3, 4, and 5, and Google claims the added context behind the system makes workout detection nearly twice as accurate while cutting missed activities by more than half. Fitbit Edge will support it too.