|
According to reports, tennis star Maria Sharapova on Wednesday presented a prototype dress to the press that lights up when the wearer’s cell phone rings.
Sharapova showed off the dress to photographers and passers-by from the window of a department store in London. According to Reuters, one shoulder of the dress down to the hip is embellished with translucent white scales that move and light up when a call is received.
London College of Fashion student Georgie Davies came up with the idea for the short-sleeved white dress. She designed the dress, which can be connected to a cell phone using Bluetooth, as part of a school project done in conjunction with Sony Ericsson.
The 20-year-old Davies told Reuters that the garment would help alert mobile phone users to calls when they’re in noisey venues. Said Davies: "When you're in a pub or a bar, you can never, ever hear your phone.”
Apparently, Davies is not familiar with the ‘vibrate’ function on most cell phones.
Nevertheless, she gets an ‘A’ for effort. Indeed, the light-up dress is miles ahead of other technology oddities that have been dreamed up over the years. Many of these products should have been nixed long before they saw the light of day. In corporate speak, they were non-starters.
1. Battery-powered battery chargers
There have been several incarnations of the battery-powered battery charger over the years, including one by Motorola. Inventors of these products tend to be conceptually-challenged. SEE ALSO: dehydrated water.
2. Chocolate record phonograph
According to Dr. Leopold Nahan’s seminal work, Milky in the Filberts , human beings are obsessed with the notion of combining things that they like. This sort or double-your-pleasure strategy, while understandable, rarely works. Take the case of the chocolate record phonograph. Designed by Germany’s Sollwerck Chocolate Company in 1903, the idea was to have an actual working phonograph that played LPs made of edible chocolate. Two possible concerns spring to mind. One, you can end up eating yourself right out of a record collection. Two, the audio quality of chocolate is less than ideal. Years later, Sollwerck came out with a bon-bon that doubled as a spark plug.
3. Inflatable dartboard
Sellers of the inflatable dartboard talked up the product’s portability. They said less about the life span of the product. Saving grace: the dartboard came with a puncture repair kit.
4. Fire alarm box with handcuff
A rise in the number of false alarms during the Depression led one U.S. company to release this handy device in 1938. Based on fairly simple engineering, the contraption would lock the user to the fire alert box once he or she pulled the alarm. Local fire department officials, who were able to trap scores of pranksters, praised the device. Law-abiding citizens, particularly those who sent an alarm from the scene of an actual fire, were less enthusiastic. RELATED: Early medieval Legal Code (esp. section 666: “Witches and Other Consorts of the Devil Float, True Believers Sink”).
5. Mobile treadmill
Few inventions generated more debate. Fans of the mobile treadmill claimed it addressed the biggest drawback of conventional treadmills—lack of scenery. Critics, however, said the gizmo failed to address the biggest drawback of mobile treadmills—they’re idiotic. SEE ALSO: The Step
Only registered users can write comments.
Please login or register. |
