By Kim Do-yeun
Electrical engineer David Forbes was going through the Detroit airport, on his way home from a family vacation, when he was stopped by airport security guards. More than 50 people had called security as soon as he stepped into the airport.
The big scene started when Forbes was spotted wearing a coat made of 160 pieces of circuit boards and electronic components, sparking suspicions that it could be explosive.
However, the coat was shown to be nothing more than a “wearable TV” when the man turned it on and began playing “The Simpsons,” the popular animated sitcom.
Forbes, who collects used LED screens, made his first wearable TV in 2009 — the world’s worst TV, as he calls it. It weighed 22 kg and only displayed one color: red.
He then decided to make a much lighter, higher-quality wearable TV, initially funding his project from selling wristwatches, a sideline business of his.
Judging that a 160x120 pixel display would nicely fit his coat, Forbes began to collect flexible circuit boards from various small electronic devices that he owned. Flexibility would translate into wearability.
He created a long, thin board strung with lines of LED, and sent the sample to a manufacturing company to create 175 copies. Batteries were added, along with circuit boards that relay signals from an iPod that could be hooked onto the coat.
In the final product, which weighs 3.6 kg, the flexible LED display boards hang down the front and back of the coat, with Velcro in place of buttons running down the front.
It is certainly a much sleeker version of Forbes’s first 22-kg product, but it remains to be seen whether the engineer could produce a real “TV coat” that receives TV signal, instead of just screening videos from iPods.
“I don’t wear this every day,” Forbes said. “I save it for when I want attention from strangers.”