The DecoLive Jacket has been accepted as a Demonstration at the 19th ACM International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM 2020).
As technology advances, wearable technologies started to appear as aesthetical everyday wear with interactive and dynamic visual elements. However, the power requirements of such interactive technologies still pose a limitation for the general acceptability of wearables. Wearable designs with batteries embedded create the burdensome need for charging them. Also, issues of energy efficiency and sustainability are increasingly important factors for wearable designs. To address these issues, we present the design and prototype of the DecoLive Jacket, a battery-free dynamic clothing that allows its wearer to switch between two states of flower patterns -opened and closed- as subtle indications of availability for social interactions. The Jacket embodies two electrochromic (EC) displays and NFC-based wireless energy harvesting components, enabling battery-free operation. The wearer controls the garment’s patterning by placing a smartphone in one of the two pockets of the jacket, activating either the open or closed flower visualisation, and expressing a subtle message about their willingness to interact with others. DecoLive Jacket demonstrates the potential for battery-free EC displays on aesthetic wearables to enable dynamic control of the non-verbal messages communicated by clothing.
Link to paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3428361.3431192
