NEW YORK-Imagine your life story and your daily life compressed into a fashion accessory that combines computing and communications into a fashion accessory.
Charmed Technologies, Beverly Hills, Calif. a venture-backed Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab spinoff, plans to make the first iteration of this futuristic vision real late this year. Suggested retail price, about $2,000 to $2,400.
The Charmed Communicator is a wearable, wireless broadband device that can be operated by voice, pen or keyboard. Modules, offered in varied shapes, sizes and colors, can provide mobile telephony, wireless Web browsing, e-mail, video game, digital photography, video capture, global positioning system, MP3 and even full personal computing functionality.
The Communicator uses highly efficient new computer chips, like those from Transmeta Corp. and Intel Corp. The device runs Nanix, Charmed’s trademarked name for an operating system it developed to handle mobile computing devices worn on the body. Nanix is based on Linux, an open-source operating system.
The three-part device includes an eye-wear accessory that serves as a virtual computer screen. This communicates wirelessly with a wrist-mounted microphone and a belt-mounted computer. With up to 20 gigabytes of storage capacity possible today and a terabyte (1,000 gigabytes) possible within the next decade, the Charmed Communicator affords its owners the opportunity to store records of much of their entire lives, according to its backers.
And that is just the beginning. The wearable device could become, quite literally, part of the fabric of peoples’ lives. At the Charmed European Research and Development Center, work is under way on a cloth that maintains constant body temperature regardless of outside conditions. Sensors to monitor vital functions and mood changes are being incorporated into clothing. Still other garments are in development that could identify viruses, explosives and pollutants in the environment.
The Beverly Hills 90210 address of Charmed Technologies seems at once unlikely and appropriate, given the founders’ personal histories and their high-tech, high-fashion vision of wireless communications. Chief Operating Officer Katrina Barillova, a former Czechoslovakian model and spy, met Chief Executive Officer Alex Lightman, an MIT alumnus, at a Hollywood party. A U.S. resident by then, she was on duty at the time in her job as a bodyguard for corporate executives and celebrities.
The company, founded last year, made its commercial debut with the Charmed Badge, a $20 device that uses an infrared transceiver to communicate with similar devices. Used at trade shows, the badge periodically transmits its identification and records responding information into its 16 kilobyte memory.
Charmed Technologies matches badge wearers with similar interests as determined from questionnaires incorporated into its database. An algorithm scores the match and displays the percentage of similarity on the badge’s Light Emitting Diode.
