Intel has announced a wearables partnership with fashion designer Hussein Chalayan, starting with the demonstration of smart glasses and belts at Paris Fashion Week. The designer’s Spring/Summer 2017 collection featured stress-sensing connected glasses powered by the Intel Curie module, a tiny, low-power hardware product that gives designers and makers the ability to gather biometric data from the wearer. It monitors brainwave, heart rate, and breathing data to infer stress in real time, said Intel.
The show also included connected belts, powered by the Intel Compute Stick, a minuscule computing device that the company said is the same size as a pack of gum. The belts capture the biometric data from the glasses and translate the information into visualisations that interpret the wearer’s stress level. Housed within the belts is a small Pico projector that displays the visualisations onto a wall in real time, as the models move down the runway. Intel added that the projected imagery serves as a visual cue to the wearer who, by initiating stress-reduction techniques, sees the imagery change in correspondence with her body’s response.
Intel and the designer have also created five studies based on the so-called “Room Tone” show, to be displayed at the Design Museum’s “Fear and Love: Reactions to a Complex World” exhibition in London, starting in November.
