Tago Arc Smart Bracelet Blends E-Ink And NFC



From gizmos to trinkets: the era of smart jewelry is upon us, with makers and businesses of all stripes and sizes busy mixing electronics and sensors with ‘fashion-friendly’ designs intended to be displayed proudly on the person.

Sure your Fitbit wristlet is technically a wearable but it’s not going to be garnering aesthetic attention and is probably intentionally tucked under your cuff. (Perhaps to hide the rash it’s given you…). And so another category of wearables is hoping to push in here — trying to convince consumers to shell out for a trinket whose primary ‘smart’ is the ability to change how it looks, mostly just for kicks and/or notifications.

Last fall, for instance, Sony outed a minimalist e-paper smartwatch, called the FES Watch. It’s due to ship later this year. The watch face and band designs can customizable by the user, thanks to the use of low-power e-ink tech. This is e-ink as a fashion fabric.

And that’s just the vanguard. E-ink’s low power consumption gets round the primary problem of current gen wearables: sucky battery life. So expect a whole lot more of this pattern-shifting stuff to start cropping up.

To wit: tago arc — an e-ink bracelet in the making. Its makers are currently passing round the donations bowl on crowdfunding site Indiegogo to raise $40,000 to turn their prototype into a shipping product by next December.

tago arc

The bracelet will combine a flexible e-ink screen with NFC transfer tech so that a new design can be loaded onto the device via a companion Android app, using an NFC enabled smartphone or tablet to power the transfer. (Support for iOS devices is not currently possible owing to Apple locking down the iPhone 6’s NFC chip for Apple Pay only.)

So, to be clear, tago’s twist is that it needs (and has) no on-board battery. The NFC draws the power it needs for a transfer from the mobile device’s battery as and when the user is changing the design. When in its resting display state, e-ink does not draw power so no battery is needed to power the device at other times — so it’s a battery-free wearable. Or that’s the promise.

“Our current prototype can change display with a smartphone (through NFC, without external power), with the working tago app we developed,” CEO Zoli Kovács tells TechCrunch. “We are now working on the final design and software optimizations. The electronics (on flexible printed circuits, flexible display, etc) are ready to be put in the final commercial version of the tago arc.”
tago arc prototype

The choice of NFC also opens the bracelet up to functionality expansion in future, according to Kovács, who hints that contactless payments might be supported down the line “perhaps one day”. Although he also stresses that the primary motivation here is to build a wearable accessory that looks good, rather than to add on lots of functionality bells and whistles.

“We are not adding extra features onto the bracelet like incoming call/message or email display for now, we would like to just give you a revolutionary piece of accessory,” he says. “We believe NFC is the future (over bluetooth) and due to the evolving functionalities of it there are going to be several features that can be added on to the #tago arc bracelet later on — perhaps one day you will even be able to pay with it.”

Read More

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

NASA’s Super Guppy Gives Mars-Bound Spacecraft A Lift

Image
Today the Orion capsule, NASA’s spacecraft designed to bring humans to Mars, starts its next phase of development at Kennedy Space Center. The remarkable part is that just this morning, that large spacecraft was at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans. In order to carry Orion from New Orleans to Cape Canaveral, NASA recruited their Super Guppy aircraft. The Super Guppy has a cargo area that is 25 feet tall, 25 feet wide and 111 feet long. The jumbo plane can carry over 26 tons worth of cargo and is often used by NASA to ferry large components around the country that would take too long (or be impossible) to ship by land or by sea. The Super Guppy’s history dates back to the Apollo program. It was used in the 1960’s to carry parts of the Saturn V rocket from California to Florida. The other option NASA had was to ship rocket stages through the Panama Canal, which would often take weeks or months longer.
Read more

Dell XPS 13 2015 Review and Giveaway

Image
At Consumer Electronics Show 2015, Dell’s XPS 13 2015 edition swept the awards for laptops, particularly in the $800 price range. Considering the sheer quality of its competition, this was no easy feat. But, dude, are you getting a Dell? Read on to find out. Before going private, Dell’s sales weren’t doing great. It had slipped from the top PC seller to somewhere near sixth place in 2007. After a contested buyout in November of 2013, Dell’s future looked uncertain. However, its movements following the acquisition proved shrewd. Rather than releasing a deluge of models, as they had under public ownership, Dell refocused its efforts on building better products. The Dell XPS 13 2015 edition is part of the first line of laptops and tablets released following its departure from public ownership. The new line of Ultrabooks still use Dell’s made-to-order approach. Buyers configure their device online, selecting from a large number of parts and value-added options, with a base price of ...
Read more

Who To Follow On Twitter, According To Marc Andreessen

Image
Well-known Tweetstormer and investor Marc Andreessen has produced a list of his favorite people to follow on Twitter. He was prompted to do so by an article in The Information called “Silicon Valley’s Frontman Problem” by Jessica Lessin, who questioned if the industry leaders most often quoted by the media (she cited Andreessen, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel) really “represent the views of the broader Silicon Valley community.” “The more media coverage Silicon Valley gets, the more important it is that other voices get heard,” Lessin wrote. (In addition to Lessin’s thought piece, New York magazine also just published an interview with Andreessen, in which he talked about the cultural changes in Silicon Valley since he arrived in 1994 and diversity in the tech industry, among other topics.) His list “only a highly abridged selection,” Andreessen (@pmarca) tweeted, but a helpful one because his public list of tech industry-related accounts has over 600 members. Since Andreessen’s ...
Read more