Hashtag Gloves will let you tweet without typing

A 24-hour hackathon at Mount Holyoke College in the U.S has inspired one of the most specific wearables yet, but one that could also be one of the most useful for this time of year: Hashtag Gloves. Using them, its inventors sent the first ever tweet via glove. (See them in action on YouTube.)

As Daily Dot reports, the gloves have conductive fabric on the fingers, with a voltage running through it that’s shorted when a wearer does the hashtag hand signal, letting the gloves know it’s time to tweet. What’s the hashtag hand symbol? Making a # with the first two fingers of each hand, of course. (Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake are the masters.)

Once the gloves know you’re ready to tweet, voice recognition software kicks in, so your hands can stay warm while you connect to your friends and followers. Four students came up with the idea in part inspired by Fallon and Timberlake’s video but mostly inspired by the cold weather.

They originally thought the gloves would work well for snowboarders, but they could have a broader appeal – from anyone who practices a winter sport to those of us who spend too many frozen minutes at the bus stop each morning. Not bad for a (long) day’s work. They hope that when they go on sale they’ll be around $50 (around £32).

For now, the prototype’s too unwieldy to make them a viable stocking stuffer but the group plans to add Bluetooth connectivity and make the gloves work seamlessly over Wi-Fi so people can keep their phones in their pockets while they tweet about the hashtag awesome time they’re having on the slopes.

In the meantime, follow them on Twitter for such insights as ‘#WeStillGloves’ and ‘video’. Sure, it’s not Shakespeare, but it’s more than a scarf’s ever said.

Image via Alan Levine’s Flickr.

Want to read more? We’ve chosen our 20 favourite coats and 16 favourite ankle boots to get ready for the winter weather.

If you’re more interested in getting a new camera than new clothes this season, you might be interested in these camera accessories for your iPhone, which beg the question: Do you need a camera if you own a camera phone?