MIT's 'living jewlery'

MIT’s ‘living jewelry’ is made up of small robot assistants. For now, most of the robots’ tasks are decorative. The lab is also exploring some interesting non-design functions. On a raincoat, for example, temperature sensors could trigger the robots to pull the hood’s strings down. “We’re thinking of wearables as a personal assistant,” team member Cindy Hsin-Liu Kao told TechCrunch. “We think in the future, when they can have a brain of their own, they can learn your habits, learn your professional style, and when they get smaller, they can blend into the things you wear.” The team first published a paper detailing early versions of the robots last year. According to Hsin-Liu Kao, “a lot of people saw them as really creepy.”