Video Clothes: 'Brand' New Idea

But instead of putting the display on the jacket's sleeve or a head-mounted eyepiece, Fitch put the machine's 6-inch LCD screen on the back of the jacket, which allows everyone but its wearer to see what's going on.

"Instead of having a Puffy Combs patch on the back of your jacket, you could play a Puffy Combs video," Fitch said as he showed off the jacket in a hotel suite here last week. "It allows people to use video as a form of self-expression."

"It is a very thought-provoking product" said Jop Van Beurden, VP of marketing for flat display systems at Philips. Van Beurden said his company is working on flexible display technology, which will "open up a whole new realm of applications," such as handheld computers that can be folded like wallets, and large screens that can be rolled up like newspapers.

But Van Beurden said flexible displays probably won't be built into clothes for three to five years.

Fitch's jacket was commissioned and built to order for MSN, which debuted it at last month's ad-tech interactive advertising conference, where it was used to play Microsoft ads as the wearer strolled the show floor.

"It got a fantastic response," Fitch said. "A flock of people were following him around."

The jacket will be on display at this week's Web Attack show in New York.

The jacket is a fully featured Windows computer with a 233-MHz Pentium II processor, a 1 Gigabyte IBM micro hard drive and a broadband wireless Internet connection.