Tuttle, Onesies and Wearable Computing

London's Tuttle Club has relocated to the Royal Festival Hall, and as (for the first time in a few years) I wasn't busy on Friday morning I went along for the traditional coffee and off-the-wall conversation. And, as it always does at Tuttle, the conversation touched on many things very quickly - it went from integrating quadcopters, to virtual museums, to wearable computing. There was a general sense that (as there is with robotics) the size/cost/reliability of the sorts of componenents that go into wearable computing are now at the level that makes them almost feasible as an early mass market product - in fact, as Helen Keegan has noted, it may be becoming the New Black.

The problem, as always, is where to put everythng you need (for e.g. where do you put the power source for those powerful AR-glasses, as Helen and I were discussing) and how would you connect it reliably, so that - even with plenty of wear and tear - it continues to stay reliably connected. The answer is that ideally you need a single garment that can carry everything in it, like a large coat. But a coat is not always wearable, and neither can it easily carry the head to toe wires and sensors you will need for the Completely Quantified Self

After a bit more coffee and consideration, the answer was clear - the Onesie (above)

A garment that is a single integrated structure, so the computing systems could literally be woven into it, that can be worn 24x7, and is appropriate and welcome anywhere (as you can see clearly see above)....you just know that in The Future, we will all be wearing Onesies*

(For those of you who hoped Near Future fashions would be more like Logan's Run, this is going to come as a something of a shock....)

*And we will definitely need those powerful Alternative Reality glasses to project better clothing images onto their neutral bright blue and green Onesies