Try this on for size

A fun round-up of wearable electronics ranging from utterly silly to sleek and innovative:

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/06/is-the-rise-of-wearable-electronics-finally-here.html   (via MAKE)

Also, another great collection here from Fast Company:

http://www.fastcompany.com/1773462/smart-couture-wearable-tech-gets-wearable

Google’s Web-Only Laptop, the Chromebook

Google has unveiled a new product, the Chromebook, a web-only laptop-like computer.

Read about it:http://www.google.com/chromebook/

Or watch the cutey-cute video that gives the Chromebook a voice made of plucked strings:

Next Step for Digital Payments

Visa is working on a product coming in Fall of this year to make digital payments easier, using an “e-wallet”.

How this will actually work is somewhat mysterious at the moment, but it will simplify online payments with a single click, and will also support NFC (Near Field Communications) payments for in-person transactions by allowing people to wave their NFC-enabled phones over a PayWave station.

http://www.fastcompany.com/1752776/visa-is-making-the-e-wallet-a-real-thing

Self-Driving Robot Cars

Google has acknowledged that they have been working on self-driving cars for at least a year now, racking up over 140,000 miles in California tests alone.

http://gawker.com/5800949/

Interactive Cat Ears Show How You Feel

Neurowear is a Japanese fashion company that concepts around the idea of the “Augmented Human Body.”

They have created a pair of wearable feline ears that sense brain activity and respond to your emotions.

If the wearer is concentrating, they stand up.  When relaxed, the ears lie down.

Bizarre but fascinating.  What other kinds of interactive devices could respond to brain waves?

http://www.refinery29.com/cat-ear-headbands-that-move-when-you-feel

Toothtag – Teach Your Android to Do Things

Toothtag is a new Android app that allows you to tag people (by sensing their phones) and locations (by sensing wifi hotspots and more).

You can then customize actions that will happen when you are near those places or people.

You could get an alert when your friend is nearby, or automatically check in on Foursquare when you enter your gym.

Toothtag is actually only a showcase application created by a software company called Neuaer to demonstrate their proximity platform, on which they want others to build more applications that will use the device and location-detecting capabilities.

The platform (and Toothtag) uses Bluetooth, Wifi, and NFC (Near Field Communication) technologies.

Discovered via Laughing Squid

Objects Augmented with Real-Time Contextual Data

DisplayContent is a thought-provoking augmented reality proof of concept to come out of the Pachube International Internet of Things Hackathon.

via fastcompany

AR Atlas

Mark Lukas gives us a beautiful example of how AR can bring the geographic and economic data of an atlas to life:

More information via Flowing Data.

Physical Facebook Like Buttons

Teenagers visiting the Coca-Cola Village Amusement Park in Israel could Like locations throughout the park simply by waving their personal RFID bracelet in front of a physical Facebook Like button.

via All Facebook

Badge Games and Ninja Hackers

DefCon is the world’s largest hacker convention.

For this year’s convention, elite hacker gang, the Ninjas, have created an interactive role-playing game that is played through specially designed badges, distributed only to those invited to their private party.

One of the most exclusive venues for fraternizing at DefCon is the Ninja party. To attend the party attendees have to know one of the Ninjas and they have to give them a badge.
In years past, a Ninja would give a party attendee a sticker or a paper invite that would get them in to the party. Last year the Ninjas took the party invite to the next level when they created their own custom badge for their party attendees. This year, badge designers Amanda Wozniak and Brandon Creighton decided to take the badge to the next level, and then some. What started as a sketch on a napkin ended up as an amazing hacker gaming and development platform.
(Via Wired)

The badge combines an old school look and feel with cutting edge features, such as the ability to wirelessly communicate with other badges.

In order to fund these extravagant badges, Ninja got funding from Facebook and Lookout:

In order to test the game while the badges were being developed, the Ninjas used the iPhone app SDK:

And to top it all off, the badge comes with an instruction manual that almost exactly mirrors the original NES manual:

All of this makes my “Adventurer” badge on Foursquare seem pretty.. dated.