Intel hits the catwalk at Paris Fashion Week to show designer sunglasses

The marriage of fashion and technology is advancing, as Intel announced today a collaboration with fashion designer Hussein Chalayan at his runway show during Paris Fashion Week.

Chalayan’s models showed off brand new glasses and belts powered by Intel technology, as part of a special demonstration. The demo was one of Intel’s many fashion collaborations to make technology cool under its “amazing experiences outside” brand campaign.

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Intel said Chalayan’s Room Tone devices work together to bring a new level of awareness and proactive stress management to everyday life through the use of sensors, projected visualizations, and new approaches to wearable technology for fashion. What’s more, the concept elevates the utility of clothing and accessories with intelligent capabilities.

As technology and fashion continue to converge, Intel looks forward to empowering and inspiring designers and brands who share the vision of incorporating technology into their collections and shows, the company said. Collaborations between tech and fashion companies are increasingly common, as seen with the partnership Voke talked about at New York Fashion Week.

“I have been working with wearable technology for many years,” said designer Chalayan, in a statement. “Throughout this time, it has been very important for me to work on ideas which will be as close as possible to a real product, while also challenging myself at the same time. Intel’s years of experience, out-of-the-box mentality, commitment to innovation, and level of perfection has made this project one of the most valuable and exciting collaborations for me in recent years.”

The collection included stress-sensing connected glasses powered by the Intel Curie module, a tiny, low-power hardware product with the ability to collect biometric data from the wearer. It senses brainwave, heart rate, and breathing data to infer stress in real time.

Intel Curie features an onboard Bluetooth LE connection that communicates the wearers’ biometric data to another device (such as a smartphone). In this demonstration, the biometric data is communicated to a belt.

The glasses are also equipped with capacitive electroencephalogram (EEG) electrodes to measure asymmetrical brainwave activity, an optical heart rate sensor to measure heart rate variability, and a microphone to measure breathing rate.

Intel also showed connected belts, powered by the Intel Compute Stick, a small computing device that’s about the size of a pack of gum. The belts capture the biometric data from the glasses and translate the information into visualizations that interpret the wearer’s stress level. Housed within the belts is a small Pico projector that displays the visualizations onto a wall in real time, as the models move down the runway. The projected imagery serves as a visual cue to the wearer who, by initiating stress-reduction techniques, sees the imagery change in correspondence with her physical response.

Intel and Chalayan showed five studies using unique, never-before-seen glasses and belts to illustrate the potential of future integrations of fashion and technology. The theme of the “Room Tone” show and collection centers on “the Here and Now of London life,” consisting of a series of five studies which are simultaneous reactions and proposals on how certain attitudes or realities in London life can be experienced or optimized.

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Following Paris Fashion Week, the five studies will be on display at the Design Museum’s “Fear and Love: Reactions to a Complex World” exhibition in London, starting in November.