Last sunday was the finale in the IDL darts championship, and in the audience were several people with a new gadget: shirts with displays in them (or rather, shirts with light effects in them). It looked like a generic shirt, only part of it was blinking and changing colors (it was a Dutch flag iirc).

Now, on slashdot we also read about smart shirts: shirts with elaborate nanotech in them that monitors your heart-rate, temperature and whats more. Useful for monitoring elderly, athletes or (of course) soldiers.

Now this is where the dream I had last night comes in: shirts with activation codes. You buy a branded shirt, say a nike shirt. Only there is no nike logo on it, for that you first have to activate it. Once you upload the activation code into your shirt, to make sure you’ve got the genuine product, the logo will appear!

Sort of reminds me of this sci-fi story i read in Asimov’s one or two months ago. In the story people would install (or rather have tatooed on them) corporate displays. They could show whatever they wanted on the displays, but once in a while a commercial for the company would show up. Actually, I’m surprised you can’t already have your body tattooed with the coca-cola logo all over and receive a nice sum of money from the good coca cola company…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 16th, 2006 at 08:23 and is filed under English, Sci-fi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.