LumiGram in France has come up with some pretty cool fiber optic fabrics. Clothes, table cloths, bags and pillows are lit up with battery powered LED’s running through fiber optics woven into the fabric.
Naturally, this means that all their products need to be carefully hand-washed and can only be folded parallel to the optics to prevent damage. I think this explains why the clothing seems to be oriented towards females since most of their clothes requires special care anyways. Still, I really like the light-up table cloth they have.
I’m not much for toys – but sometimes something catches my eye as being a handy thing to have. The Roomba robot, created by iRobot is one such device. Put it down, press a button and this little robot traverses your home vacuming on it’s own. It can go under furniture and has automatic room discovery software that allows it to get a picture of the area to be cleaned and figure out the most efficient way to do so.
It even has the ability to detect areas that are extra dirty and gives them a little extra attention. This is great, for someone like myself – I have a tendency to operate in my own little world and that sometimes leads to unintentional neglect of such tasks such as floor cleaning. Advanced models allow for scheduling of the little cleaning beasty and the Roomba can even park itself in it’s charger by itself.
Imagine you can go about your daily life and this small droid takes care of your floors for you. Replace frequent cleaning tasks such as vacuming and sweeping with merely picking up the Roomba and emptying it’s dirt chamber occasionally.
Of course, at $300 and up (although a refurbished model goes for $200) such convenience is not cheap.
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