This wearable from Sony will keep you cold when you step outside

Japanese tech giant Sony has showcased a wearable air conditioner called Reon Pocket, which is designed to keep you cool or warm when you step outside. The Reon Pocket, a portable air conditioner stemmed from Sony’s crowdfunding platform – First Flight. The Reon Pocket is available for sale on crowdfunding website for approx. $117, but is only available in Japan as of now.

The wearable device slides into the back pocket of a specially designed t-shirt. You can then wear anything on top of that. The Reon Pocket works on ‘Peltier effect wherein a small flow of electric current allows it to either absorb or give out heat. You control the device using a companion app, to increase the temperature. ‘Peltier’ effect is also used in wine and car ac coolers.

This isn’t the first time a company has tried to make a wearable personal cooler. In CES 2018, there was Embr Wave and since then there have been few other personal thermostat devices for skiing or snowboarding. One thing that goes in favour of the Reon Pocket is its size, allowing it to fit seamlessly beneath a regular shirt or t-shirt.

The wearable device is expected to arrive in other markets by early 2020, so you have to bear this year’s heatwave like previous years.

It should also be kept in mind that this is a crowdfunding product and there might be chances that it never sees the light of the day. In 2015, a Kickstarter study claimed that 1 in 10 ‘successful’ products that do receive their funding goals fail to actually deliver rewards afterwards. And of the ones that do deliver constantly, get delayed or miss deadlines, which means there is often disappointment later for those products that do get to do for what they are designed.