Put on your jacket and fire up the computer

LONDON - Spitting Image, the current affairs rubber puppet programme of the 1980s may be responsible for a computing breakthrough that has been promised for years yet never come to fruition.

Here's how. Two of the people who worked on the British programme were challenged to come up with a cloth that could conduct electricity. (It had something to do with being able to animate more bits of the puppets.)

After a lot of work with Brunel University, they developed something that fitted the bill - soft, malleable, yet able to conduct electricity through a layer of conductive fibre built into the material.

Unfortunately, the programme had long since finished, but their product had other potential uses.

So in 1998 they set up their company, Eleksen, and six years later things are starting to pick up - we're getting close to "wearable computing", one of the many holy grails of computing.

You know what wearable computing is, because you've laughed at fashion and computer designers' attempts to implement it, usually involving Christmas lights sewn into a Bacofoil outfit and a computer screen stuck on the head.

This illustrated the problem with past versions of this idea.

First, the important bits of computers, the processor and associated circuitry, had to be housed in sturdy boxes because the circuit boards used were stiff and generated lots of heat.

Second, they were heavy, weighed down by things such as power supplies and the fans needed to remove the heat.

As well, a screen was needed, and where would you put the keyboard? On a shelf attached to your chest?

The problem of portability for computers has long since been solved.

A mobile phone or handheld computer has as much power as a laptop of five years ago, and the handheld can have many more facilities, such as wireless local area network (LAN) connectivity and Bluetooth and the ability to make a phone call.

What Eleksen has solved is the input side. Its material can be used to detect contact at any point, so you could print the keys of a keyboard on the material and link it to a computer.

With suitable software in between, pressing the points on the cloth where the keys are printed will produce the required response from the computer.

The new fabric is no heavier than a waterproof material such as Gore-Tex, and can be rolled up tightly - one of the first Eleksen products was a roll-up keyboard for Palm handhelds.

Among those interested is Britain's Ministry of Defence, which - in that far-sighted way of people who spend all day wondering what to do with taxpayers' money - can see potential for the military.

Someone in the front line could enter data on a "keyboard" printed on the sleeve of his or her combat jacket.

That leaves the output side. Screens are bulky, and nobody has yet cracked the problem of making a truly flexible screen.

But why should we need a visual output? Speech-based input is still limited. It doesn't work well in noisy environments, or with a wide range of vocabulary from unknown people, but computer-generated speech is improving.

You could have a Bluetooth headset linked to the computer taking your "soft" input and get all the answers you'd need.

Want to know where you are? Press the GPS button on your sleeve and get an address read into your ear. Want to hear urgent e-mail while you drive or walk? Press the "yes" button when your handheld says it's come in.

Wearable computing is going to envelop and alter our lives in subtle ways over the next 10 years. And all because someone wanted to make a rubber slug depicting the education secretary of the day look even more revolting.

- INDEPENDENT