PesentTense:Humanity has finally reached the point in its evolution when a person can stand miserably on a train somewhere outside Donabate and be cheered up as someone in New York gives them a hug.
A design company earlier this year announced the arrival of the Hug Shirt, a garment that, when instructed by your mobile phone, will simulate the embrace of a loved one. It recreates their warmth, strength and even their heartbeat. The shirt remains a prototype. There are, you'd imagine, a few bugs that need to be worked out. Not least the legal consequences were someone to set the T-shirt to "throttle".
There is also the question of just who has access to the clinch. Is that sudden constriction you feel as the Dart crawls through Kilbarrack coming all the way from your other half, or someone you took out a restraining order against? Vitally, the Hug Shirt is machine-washable and can be worn outdoors, avoiding the possibility of a fatal embrace should someone press the "emote" control at the same moment as you're cowering under a heavy shower.
The idea was captivating enough for Time magazine to name it among the inventions of the year. And a Singapore lab has since adapted the idea for use in remotely fondling chickens. In a press release, it somewhat pointedly announced that this was a "serious" idea for the care of maltreated poultry. It might have silenced the sniggering had the press release not been signed by a "Dr Cheok".
The makers of the Hug Shirt have previously come up with such concepts as the A-Nerve, a text message-receiving sleeve that lights up when an SMS comes through and flashes a different colour depending on who sent it. They also developed a glove that passes a secret message to another glove.
The promise of wearable technology has been a long time coming. Among the earliest claims to a wearable computer is the 1955 shirt designed to predict the spin of a roulette wheel.
Backpacks and winter coats are now sold with built-in controls for electronic devices. Nike and iPod have collaborated on a running shoe that lets you know how far you've run, and at what pace. The sportswear giant also has a range of running clothes specifically designed to allow you to thread your iPod through the fabric, while Apple has been marketing its new iPod Shuffle on its wearability. Given that the Shuffle currently hangs off you with all the tug of a malnourished butterfly, it surely cannot be long before it is fully integrated with fashion.
Elsewhere, Trevor Baylis - inventor of the wind-up radio - has been touting the idea of a shoe that uses the kinetic energy built up while walking to recharge mobile phones. Others have suggested harnessing that energy to power wearable computers, although the current limits of technology mean that to don a wearable personal computer would still mean looking like you had charged recklessly through a stand at PC World.
As the practical applications get figured out, however, the more conceptual notions remain the most charming, for example designer Lisa Stead's Emotional Wardrobe garments, which flirt with the owner when she walks by. Stead created a scarf, rather ominously called Pikme, which "feels distressed and lonely". As you prepare to leave the house, apparently, the scarf reveals more of its pain to you. Its companion, Icaris the feathered jacket, "suffers from low self-esteem and fear". Just the kind of things you want hanging in your wardrobe. A Douglas Adams-esque vision in which you are greeted each morning by a lippy T-shirt, depressed and crumpled as you opt instead for a gloating polo shirt. Dresses that complain, not that they have nothing to wear, but that they have no one to wear them.
However, this textile-centred version of anthropomorphism, and the sentiment behind the Hug Shirt, shows just how much humanity is obsessed with technology. The acceleration of modern communications technology, after all, has been driven by the group instinct. Mobile phones allow us to be together even when we're apart. Social networking sites such as Bebo and MySpace have allowed the tribal instinct to expand in new ways.
Wearable technology may ultimately be driven by similar factors: by emotion, as in the fibres being developed that will change colour to match a mood; or by health concerns, through vests that will be able to tell you if that tingling in your arm means you're having a heart attack. And by the primeval need to have pointless fun: Australian scientists have recently woven computer circuits through a T-shirt to create an air guitar that actually plays, the movement of your arms picked up by a computer which then interprets the "notes" being mangled.
Ultimately, turning us into quasi-cyborgs may serve only to re-emphasise aspects of our humanity. Which, admittedly, sounds like a hackneyed closing speech from an episode of Star Trek. Now, would someone please text me a hug.
