The strangest Internet of Things (IoT) Devices and Ideas.

IoT Has Come to Stay - Strangest Internet of Things

Being such a powerful and versatile technology, created with the objective of making our lives much easier, it is no surprise that people would manage to make the strangest inventions based on it. Especially in the age of memes we are in today.

So, if you feel like you need some joy in your life, some inspiration for a product, or just some motivation to open your business (I mean, if these things manage to sell, what doesn’t?), here is a selection of some of the weirdest IoT devices and ideas you can find throughout the internet:

tshirtOS

Ever wanted to be a living breathing Twitter feed? Yeah, neither did we. A while back, whiskey brand Ballantine’s came up with the concept of a T-shirt that could connect to your phone through a mobile app and display stuff such as your Twitter or Instagram feed dynamically like if it was the T-shirt’s stamp. Like, Teletubby-style. It would also come with features such as a camera and a microphone for some reason.

The company had started a campaign to find how many people were interested in the product, but it seems it ended up being a bit of a fiasco. The idea of having such power of customization over our clothing is pretty interesting, but connecting a giant display on your belly to your social media is probably not the best idea.

Quirky Egg Minder

Do you like eggs? Do you use them a lot? Do you have a lot of people living with you and all of them use eggs a lot too? Do you also have some severe communication problems among you for some reason? Well, the tech company Quirky has the solution: Quirky Egg Minder.

Quirky Egg Minder is basically a smart egg tray. That’s right: you can place up to 14 eggs in it, and it will send a message to your phone when they are starting to get bad or you need to buy more. And you can even check the status of your tray anywhere you are by using its app!

Of course, this is the kind of problem you could solve by taking a look in the fridge before you go buy your groceries, if you are a bit forgetful it could at least be useful.

Otohiko fork

If you are the type of person who makes a lot of noise while eating, and often becomes embarrassed because of it, you’d be interested in taking a look at the Otohiko fork (if it still existed).

The Otohiko fork was a special smart fork created by food company Nissin (yes, the one that makes Ramen and Cup Noodles) in order to, you guessed it, help you while eating noodles. It doesn’t do anything fancy like automatically putting food in your mouth or finding out how healthy what you’re eating is. Instead, it detects when you’re slurping and bursts out a noise to hide the slurping sound.

You can’t make this up.

The Otohiko isn’t being sold anymore, which shouldn’t come as a surprise: canceling noise is pretty hard, and adding random “pleasing” sounds with any slurping could call more attention to it than really disguise it.

Nice try though. Must have been fun giving it to unsuspecting visitors.

Hari Mari’s smart flip flops

Being fit is now more technological than ever. We have apps that count calories and nutrients of your food, that use GPS to track your path when you go out running, that monitor your heartbeat, and some can even calculate how many calories you burned out in the gym. So, getting on that bandwagon, footwear brand Hari Mari came up with a flip flop that… gives discounts?

Yep. Instead of aiding in your physical health, Hari Mari’s smart flip flops would help your financial health (kinda) by sending discount alerts to your phone whenever you walked by a Hari Mari store while wearing those flip flops, thanks to a short-range tracking chip embedded within them. They were being sold for $110 though, so they wouldn’t help much unless you were some kind of flip flop aficionado.

With IoT being relatively new and prototype-y we already have this set of weird products, who knows what the future will bring next.

https://pixel-earth.com/the-strangest-internet-of-things-iot-devices-and-ideas/