Watch: Temporary tattoos to control your smartphone and other technology you will soon be wearing

Temporary tattoos instantly recall the cheap cartoonish ones everyone got with packs of chewing gum or potato chips. And unless you are at a wedding or you are Bappi Lahiri, gold is often too gaudy for everyday use. But the gold leaf temporary tattoos in the video above, developed by a team of PhD students at MIT, might just be worth your time.

The tech itself is available in other forms, whether through hands free remote control devices or smart watches, but none of them has the seeming swag that gold leaf temporary tattoos will bring. Imagine the potential in rap and hip-hop videos alone.

Transforming ordinary humans into gold-plated trans-humans, these tattoos create digital interfaces on your skin. For now, this means you can change songs on a smartphone or convert your skin into a track-pad or a slider. These tattoos are influenced by the trend of flash tattoos that has gained momentum over the last year.

Wearable tech is a burgeoning industry and there's everything from T-shirts with solar panels that will charge your phone to a hand tree – a bangle on your hand that purifies air. Useful in a future world where the air will not be good enough for humans to breathe.

Here's a video where designer Pauline Van Dongen describes how solar cells can be integrated into fashion.

If you are the kind of person who wears the same clothes come rain or shine, worry not, here is the Rainbow Winters collections. The collection has lights that react to sound and change colour accordingly. Below is what it would like during a thunderstorm.

Recently, Kerala Excise Commissioner Rishiraj Singh said that you could be arrested for staring at a woman longer than 14 seconds. Here's a dress that can confuse all those starers of the world. Made using eye-tracking technology, the dress in the video below changes colour if you look at it for too long. Perhaps that age-old question needs to be asked: if a dress changes colour if you look at it for too long, is it the same ship? And by extension is the person wearing it the same person?

All Albus Dumbledore ever wanted was to own a pair of woolly socks. Wonder what he would have made of the smart socks below, with sensors to track your movements.