Smart Clothing Allows Instant Color Changes and Future Tech

Welcome to another fun-filled Monday full of science and technology news! Let’s start off this week with some fresh innovation from around the world.

Smart Clothing Allows Instant Color Changes

From 3D-printed fashion accessories to piercings, smart fashion is totally in! Why? Because in today’s modern age, people don’t want to copy their favorite celebrity or fad - they want to look unique and stand out from the crowd. This is an industry soon-to-be dominated by tech in the future.

As part of Google’s Project Jacquard, an initiative to make touch-enabled and interactive clothing, researchers at UC Berkeley in California have made smart threads (called Ebb) that change color when an electric charge is applied to them, paving the way for display-enabled and on-the-go color-changing clothing.

“Ebb is an exploration of dynamic textiles created in partnership with Project Jacquard. The thermochromic pigments change colors in slow, subtle, and even ghostly ways, and when we weave them into fabrics, they create calming “animations” that move across the threads. Ebb offers a nuanced and subtle approach to displaying information on fabrics,” says Laura Devendorf, a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley leading the development of Ebb technology.

BMW to Launch Self-Driving Car by 2021

After successfully launching two electric cars (BMW i3 and i8), BMW is all set to launch the company’s first-ever self-driving car by the year 2021.

“People often ask me, when will we be driving autonomously? My answer is: We already can,” says BMW CEO Harald Krueger, “In 2018, we will launch a BMW i8 Roadster. This will be followed in 2021 by the BMW i NEXT, our new innovation driver, with autonomous driving, digital connectivity, intelligent lightweight design, a totally new interior and ultimately bringing the next generation of electro-mobility to the road,” he added.

Samsung to Mass Produce 256GB SD Card

Samsung has launched the EVO Plus 256GB SD card that offers the highest external memory available in SD cards today for $250, or Rs.17000. Previously, the ‘record’ was held by SanDisk (200GB SD card).

The card uses Samsung’s in-house V-NAND technology to offer read and write speeds of 95MB/s and 90MB/s respectively. It is waterproof, X-Ray proof, magnet-proof, and temperature proof.

“By providing high-density UFS memory that is nearly twice as fast as a SATA SSD for PCs, we will contribute to a paradigm shift within the mobile data storage market. We are determined to push the competitive edge in premium storage line-ups – OEM NVMe SSDs, external SSDs, and UFS – by moving aggressively to enhance performance and capacity in all three markets,” said Joo Sun Choi, EVP, Memory Sales and Marketing at Samsung Electronics.

Read more at www.bit.ly/q3newsblog. Q3 Technologies is focused on custom offshore software product development in Gurgaon, including technology consulting, application migration and modernization, end-to-end support & maintenance services.