It’s always interesting to take a look at the projected fashion of the future from past decades and see how differently things turned out in reality. The simple clothes that are only slightly altered from decade to decade make the transition through time seem like a subtle and even elegant venture when compared to the incredible poofed out streamlined clothes some futurists have suggested. But one company in Japan is proposing a look that not only looks futuristic, it has the potential to catch on as well. Could we one day control our clothes with our mind?
Neuro-wear may seem like the latest manifestation of what many refer to as retro-futurism in fashion, but it has a different take on the concept. Much like the electric ink of the past, this newly developed nero-wear hopes to capture the essence of what the wearer is feeling or thinking by manifesting in some way on the clothing itself. The most prominently covered items hoping to one day reach the west at the moment are a pair of electronic cat ears that will react to the wearer’s brainwave patterns by reading them with a cheaper portable EEG sensor which is placed on the forehead. The hope is that the ears will react to the person’s thoughts and manifest in the ears themselves and become expressive much like cats do when they are paying attention.
Of course the ears will not be reacting to emotion directly, per se but rather to the intensity of the person’s thoughts. As they increase the intensity of their thoughts the ears will go up as if they are being attentive and then go down as the user relaxes and thinks less.
It’s interesting to see the points of fashion that may either catch on in the future or become a future representation of what fashion could have been but ultimately wasn’t. And while the ears and other newly developed technologies like them aren’t necessarily the cutting edge of science anymore (in fact the technology has been around for years) it seems that these items and others are showing us a future that may involve less use by the hands and more by things such as EEG scanners.
So if you can control a pair of ears on top of your head, why not a pair of glasses that can raise and lower electronically based on your thought patterns? What uses could military pilots have for devices such as these if they were to control Heads up Displays rather than an expression? Could we one day be operating computers themselves entirely wirelessly? This form of electronically assisted telekinesis is gaining in popularity as the technology becomes more fine tuned. In a matter of decades we may not actually need to even know where our phones are in order to place a call. And even cybernetic implants could be better controlled for those with disabilities as our brain patterns are better trained to do any number of things.