
A joint venture between design teams at MIT's Tangible Media Group and the Fluid Interface Group have incorporated the social network into a garment which signals to other wearers your interests and associations.

Groups that need to find each other in a crowd -- from industry conferences to people who are part of a niche interest -- are likely to want to use the clothing to find like-minded souls.

After the T-shirt has alerted you to the fact there's another wearer in the room, capacitive sensors in the shirt read either a handshake, touch or high five before the T-shirt starts transmitting your data.

The group of MIT students behind the project - Viirj Kan, Katsuya Fujii, Judith Amores, and Chang Long Zhu Jin - wanted to look at ways of seeing how social media worked outside the confines of the computer screen.

While the shirt is still in the research and development phase, the group says that commercial sponsors have a growing interest in the product.

"Current technologies are very good at connecting people over great distances but they're not so good at connecting them in the same environment," says co-designer Vriij Kan. "There's this gap and we wanted to explore that through what we've built."

"We're testing its capabilities -- it's hard to say what its limits are," the group says