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How to store information in your clothes invisibly, without electronics
A new type of smart fabric developed at the University of Washington could pave the way for jackets that store invisible passcodes and open the door to your apartment or office.
The UW computer scientists have created fabrics and fashion accessories that can store data -- from security codes to identification tags -- without needing any on-board electronics or sensors.
As described in a paper presented Oct. 25 at the Association for Computing Machinery's User Interface Software and Technology Symposium (UIST 2017), they leveraged previously unexplored magnetic properties of off-the-shelf conductive thread. The data can be read using an instrument embedded in existing smartphones to enable navigation apps.
"This is a completely electronic-free design, which means you can iron the smart fabric or put it in the washer and dryer," said senior author Shyam Gollakota, associate professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. "You can think of the fabric as a hard disk -- you're actually doing this data storage on the clothes you're wearing."
You could embroider a QR code into your clothing, too, though.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 07 2017, @08:47AM (2 children)
According to the German Wikipedia page [wikipedia.org] about clothes iron, the temperature at ironing goes only up to 220°C, that is about 500 K (the English page doesn't appear to give explicit temperatures). Looking at the Curie temperature [wikipedia.org] of different materials, actually the majority listed o the linked page (see the table on the right hand side) are clearly above that temperature. So for any of those, ironing should not destroy any magnetization.
Note that a slightly lower Curie temperature could also be useful: Ironing with a low temperature setting could preserve the information, while high-temperature ironing would delete it.
(Score: 1) by pr on Tuesday November 07 2017, @01:07PM (1 child)
Thanks to all the posters in this thread, in particular the parent and on sn in general. There have been some really cool threads recently.
Shame most of the good comments are ACs really.
PR
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday November 07 2017, @02:35PM
Thank you for expressing appreciation. It is the coin of this realm, and more precious than gold.
Washington DC delenda est.