How Flora Makes 'Wearable Computing' Fun and Fashion-Forward

Just 1.75 inches in diameter, Flora can be sewn into clothing. Photo: Adafruit

Unless you're directly involved with the maker movement, it's easy to miss how much fun its developers have. And they're not just enjoying that very peculiar kind of fun that comes from soldering circuit boards or reverse-engineering hardware drivers. They're making things that are positively silly, exciting or beautiful — for the sheer sake of creation.

While software startups are huddled in bunkers plotting funding and monetization strategies, the open hardware people are free to play. It's this playful spirit that helps animate Flora, a new wearable electronics device and development platform launched by Adafruit Industries' Limor Fried.

Basically, the Flora is a tiny computing device — just 1.75 inches across — that can be sewn into clothing or accessories. It has a USB port to connect to a Windows, Mac or Linux PC for programming. Apps for iOS and Android let you control it from a mobile phone.

As for what you use it to do, well, that's still an open question. And a big part of its answer is up to Flora's users. But at the most general level, the device can be used to control other electronics, from lights and sensors to displays and even Internet communication.

I interviewed Fried and Phillip Torrone, Adafruit's creative director, on Friday. I knew that Fried had been part of the wearable computing group at MIT, and partly because of that, I was expecting the duo to evangelize applications for health, medicine and other "serious" tech sectors that Flora could help support. We eventually got around to that, but the conversation at first was more elemental.

Flora and RGB lights. Photo: Adafruit

"I've been interested in wearables and their applications for ten years. But very few of the projects were really audacious," Fried said. "I mean, what do people really want? They want to be rock stars. They want to wear jackets with flashing lights that have flexible LED displays that can play whole videos on them."

"I want to wear Blade Runner," added Torrone. "Screens everywhere? I want to wear one. That's how I explain it to people."

In other words, in "wearables," electronics need not be loaded with obvious utility. "We could include these wearable computers as part of fashion," Fried said. "Handbags could have text or video on them. Imagine a bag — this is a kind of joke about the Canal Street knockoffs here in New York — that could show a fake Louis Vuitton logo, then switch, and it's a Chanel logo. Or, if you're trying to get around a city, instead of looking up a map on a tiny smartphone screen, you could put it on your bag, or your sleeve."

As I said to Fried and Torrone, all of this reminds me of BERG's "Incidental Media" concept video. As BERG's Jack Schulze wrote,

All surfaces have access to connectivity. All surfaces are displays responsive to people, context, and timing. If any surface could show anything, would the loudest or the most polite win? Surfaces which show the smartest, most relevant material in any given context will be the most warmly received.

In contrast to a Minority Report future of aggressive messages competing for a conspicuously finite attention, these sketches show a landscape of ignorable surfaces capitalizing on their context, timing and your history to quietly play and present in the corners of our lives.

Fried agreed. "It doesn't have to be like Las Vegas," she said. "Even in Tokyo, in the past few years, I think they've figured out how to do lots of screens in a way that isn't oppressive."

"The platform gets really interesting once you start talking about adding in sensors that can track things like temperature or location," Torrone said. "Just like the bag could switch logos, you could have clothes that switch colors depending on where you are in the city. Bright colors in one part of town, dark in another."

"That's where the health and medical applications come in, too," he added. "Once we figure out how to do these fashion applications, then we can do things like shirts that change color depending on your heart rate. Or you could have a pollution sensor, and it could change color or display depending on air quality."

When I ask Fried and Torrone about what the Flora may be able to do in a few years, they bubble over with ideas.

"Eventually, all the devices will be networked, and they'll be able to find each other by proximity," Torrone says. "So think about all the things we do on social networks today. Imagine if you could 'Like' someone's bag when you see it across the street. Or if your jacket and someone else's jacket could 'friend' each other. Instead of these little digital badges that pop up on websites, you could have electronic badges that could actually appear on your clothing, to show off your achievements. Or your skills, like in the Girl Scouts."

"We have lots of ideas," Torrone said, "but one of the things we learned from our involvement with Open Kinect is that it's better to turn it over to the community, see what they imagine, and let them go. Ultimately users and other developers are going to be the ones who figure out what the platform will do.

"That's one reason we named it 'Flora,'" he added. "Let a hundred flowers bloom."

Adafruit generally doesn't announce products until they've reached a stable 1.0 version and are ready to ship to all customers. But in Flora's case, the company decided to start with a limited public beta, both to see uses devised by the open hardware community, and to flush out any bugs that might emerge.

Flora will be released in an initial batch of 50 units, then 2,000, and scale upward from there. The target date for a 1.0 product shipping to everyone is 60 days. Until then, customers interested in Flora and its development platform will be able to sign up to be notified when more devices become available. ("We're thinking that however many people sign up, we'll try to ship at least half that," Torrone said.) Fried and Torrone will also be taking the device to workshops and hackerspaces to put it through its paces.

Limor Fried, making the Flora. Photo: Adafruit

Flora isn't the first wearable computer, or even the first wearable Arduino device. MIT Media Labs' electronic textile innovator Leah Buechley unveiled version 2.0 of her textile construction kit, the Lilypad Arduino, back in 2007. And if you look at Fried's recent "Ladyada" blog posts, there are links to products both from other DIY enthusiasts as well as big "closed hardware" companies like Nike.

Designing wearable computing devices poses serious technical challenges, which is a big part of why we haven't seen the Blade Runner, Minority Report or BERG futures just yet. One challenge is designing an entire wearable unit to be small, lightweight and flexible, but still fit along a single flat plane. Another roadblock is materials. Fried explained that finding the right thread for Flora posed real problems.

"The thread is what holds it together," she said — not a typical problem for electrical engineers. "Some products use silver-based thread, but it oxidizes after a few months of exposure, which can ruin the wiring. We had to find a high-quality stainless-steel thread that wouldn't oxidize, could carry power, would be washable, and didn't cost too much money. It took six months."

Wearables blend the skills of the engineering and electronics side of the maker movement with those of its more traditional arts and crafts side. The connecting thread between the two: making things for oneself, and finding ways to make them fun.

"I wanted to go into fashion," Fried says. She still makes her own clothes and apprenticed with a designer. "But my parents told me, 'You have to be a doctor, lawyer or engineer.' So here I am," she adds, laughing.

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Original Page: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/01/future-of-fun-flora-wearable/

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