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23 Jun 2014

The World's FirstPhone-Charging PantsAre Here

The world’s first pair of wireless mobile-charging trousers will be unveiled on Tuesday as part of a new collaboration between British fashion designer Adrien Sauvage and Microsoft.

The project started six months ago when Mr Sauvage, 31, began experimenting with wearable technology.
“My phone is always dying so I was super interested in the idea,” he said.
The prototypes have now been developed and will be modelled tonight in Bloomsbury as part of the A.Sauvage spring/summer
show at London Collections: Men.
The designer’s eponymous fashion label was established in 2010. Celebrity clients.include actor Jude Law, director Terry.Gilliam, and rapper Mos Def.
The trousers, described as a “wearable chino” by Mr Sauvage, have been fitted with a wireless charging plate from the Nokia DC-50, dismantled and reassembled within one of the front pockets of the trousers.
Mr Sauvage was keen to create a product that blended technology with high fashion, moving away from the “function over form” approach that has been taken by
wearable technology designers to date.
“This is one of the reasons for the
collaboration,” he said. “We’re so far away from that kind of design.”
Engineering the trousers involved a lot of “trial and error”, he added. “Having something that you could wear without the technology feeling cumbersome was a
challenge. It was also difficult to distribute the heat so that the wearer wouldn’t feel like they were in a sauna.”
Although these difficulties were
successfully overcome, Mr Sauvage failed to make the trousers machine washable.
The A. Sauvage charging trousers will now be available to buy for the next three months through Amazon’s fashion store.
The online giant recently launched a dedicated wearable technology store to tap into the market for hi-tech clothing, selling smart watches, fitness trackers and
wearable cameras.
The price point has yet to be set, but Mr Sauvage predicts that the trousers will cost, “over $340”.
“We don’t see a mass-market opportunity for wireless-charging trousers,” admitted Adam Johnson, head of marketing for Nokia Devices, which supported the
project. “We’re just having a bit of a hack, trying to move the wearable technology concept beyond smart watches.
This is a world first.” Fashion designers will incorporate technology into their products with greater frequency, Mr Sauvage predicted. “It’s already happening with sportswear and people use their phones so much that
technology like this will be increasingly integrated into clothing,” he said.
Wireless-charging technology utilizes inductive charging using an electromagnetic field to transfer electricity between two objects. The charging pocket uses energy,
sent through an inductive coupling to the phone, which then uses the energy to charge the phone battery.
source: The Telegraph

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