Going out with friends is one of the most fun and memorable parts of college life, but unfortunately it can also be quite dangerous. When alcohol or other substances are involved – or when you’re in an unfamiliar place – the danger increases many times over. An intoxicated person can easily get separated from their group and wind up alone or at the hands of someone who means to take advantage of their altered state.

Vive was created by a group of students at the University of Washington in collaboration with SARVA (Sexual Assault and Relationship Violence Activists). The sensor-rich wristband was designed to keep young people safe in alcohol-fueled environments without hindering their ability to have fun.

The Vive concept contains a transdermal alcohol sensor and a dehydration monitor to keep track of the wearer’s intoxication level and detect when he or she is getting dangerously dehydrated. An accelerometer and gyrometer can sense danger-indicating motions such as falling down or passing out.  But the wearer doesn’t have to be aware of their own situation in order to summon help. The Vive connects to the wearer’s smartphone via Bluetooth, and from there connects to the user’s personal social network.

The connection is made by tapping the wristband to the user’s phone, which brings up that person’s Facebook profile. Then the user and everyone else in his or her group sync their wristbands by tapping them together. This sets these people as a safety group – people who will be notified of one another’s well-being throughout the evening.

Every once in a while, each person’s Vive gives a little wiggle, reminding them to check in with the group and ensure their companions of their safety. If someone fails to answer the check-in request, the rest of the group is notified and can then go looking for the missing member of the party. Likewise, if anyone gets too drunk, too dehydrated or too horizontal, the rest of the group gets notifications.

Throughout the evening, every wearer can tap wristbands with interesting new people to add them as Facebook friends later. This adds to the social aspect of the wristband, making it appear less about safety and more about having fun. The designers have yet to present a prototype, but they have brilliant plans for how the Vive can be used to increase safety while not hindering the fun, as they detail in the video above.

The post Wristband Helps Friends Keep Each Other Safe on Nights Out first appeared on Gajitz.

Social networks were meant to help us keep in touch with friends, but the fact that your friends can now basically find you everywhere you go is a little disconcerting for some people. But those annoying people who constantly post about where they are may actually be doing you a favor, because now there’s an app that can help you hide from and avoid your friends. It’s called Cloak, and its tagline is “Incognito mode for real life.”

The app uses your friends’ location info pulled from their Instagram and Foursquare accounts (the developers will be adding more services later). If a flagged person starts to roam too close to you, the app will alert you so you can turn tail and run in the other direction. You can set perimeter alerts – you get a notification when your talkative friend is a block away or when your ex comes within a mile, for example.

In the future, the developers want to add functions like keeping track of your “friends'” repeated movements. If a person you want to avoid goes to a certain coffee shop every day before work, the app would suggest that you avoid that shop and perhaps suggest another. Of course, since a lot of people just turn off the location services on their apps now, this isn’t as useful as it would have been a couple of years ago – but if people who really don’t want to see each other can agree to use the app to avoid one another, that would be a beautiful thing.

The post Activate Stealth Mode: App Helps You Hide From Friends first appeared on Gajitz.

The whole purpose of social networking is to give us another way to connect with people – so why does it sometimes feel like we’re more isolated from other humans than ever before? A young company called Trovare has developed Amico as a way to translate Facebook into the real world.

Using a flexible wristband and a smartphone app, Amico quietly and privately helps you find like-minded people wherever you are. The Amico app connects to your Facebook profile and, when you’re out, searches for nearby folks whose profiles are similar to yours. When you’re near someone who might be compatible as a friend or partner (and who also happens to use the Amico product, of course), the wristband vibrates.

The magical part of the system is that the app doesn’t tell you which of the people nearby is a potential match. You have to figure that part out on your own by mingling and mixing with the crowd. This fun bit of mystery lets Amico avoid being a “dating app” and instead lets it be something truly unique: a tool that tells you when your potential soul mate or future BFF is within small-talk distance.

The post Friend Zone: Wristband Alerts You to Potential BFFs Nearby first appeared on Gajitz.

Taking a friend along with you when you go clothes shopping can be a mixed bag. Sure, the companionship is nice, but are you really getting honest opinions about whether the items you like are really as appealing as you think they are? Brazilian clothing store C&A is making the public at large into your own shopping companion by putting “like counters” on their garment hangers.

The idea is quite simple: when you see a C&A garment you like, whether online or in the store, you “like” that piece on the store’s Facebook page. Your “like” – along with everyone else’s – is counted on the electronic hangers in the store. That way, everyone can see how many people admire that particular garment. Maybe it’s not especially useful for figuring out how an individual piece looks on you, but at least it gives you an idea of how far-out or mainstream your fashion tastes are.

The post Social Outfit: Hangers Show How Many ‘Like’ Your Clothes first appeared on Gajitz.

You know the elderly or technophobic relative who just can’t seem to get used to reading things that aren’t in the form of hard copy? They probably wouldn’t get into Facebook in the first place, but this clever gadget may help bridge the gap between digital and analog communications. It’s the Facebook Box, designed by Steve Murray, a Product Design student at the University of Dundee in Scotland.

Murray’s invention prints out every single entry on a Facebook user’s news feed and lets that user file them away into pre-determined partitions. Murray suggests “Friends,” “Family,” and “Frapes” (joke statuses left by other people when a user accidentally stays logged into Facebook on a shared computer).  Other users might find it more helpful to use different filing systems such as “TMI,” “Cries for Attention,” “No One Cares About What Your Baby Did Today,” and “Updates From The Best Website Ever.”

The Facebook Box is very retro in its own interesting way: rather than logging in to check your news feed all day, you simply open up the box and tear off sheet after sheet of updates. The statuses print on the same type of paper used to print receipts, so once you use up the entire roll you can easily replace it and keep on keeping up with all of your “friends.”

The post Analog + Digital Communication Shoved Together Into a Box first appeared on Gajitz.