Sony crowdfunded a personal air conditioner, but only in Japan for now

Who among us hasn’t wished for a personal, private air conditioner during our climate change-addled world’s increasingly brutal summers? Well, Sony’s apparently been listening.

The company introduced a product called the Reon Pocket through its only-in-Japan First Flight crowdfunding program. It’s a unique kind of portable air conditioner; instead of blowing processed air with the aim of cooling an entire space, it’s a body-mounted device that works by lowering you internal body temperature.

As a short video demonstrates, the app-controlled device slides into the pocket of a specially designed undershirt. The pocket is situated right between your shoulder blades and it uses thermoelectric currents to provide cooling and heating.

(There’s no script for this video, it’s all visual, so you don’t need to understand Japanese to pick up on what’s happening.)

The First Flight page for Reon Pocket notes that the device is capable of lowering a wearer’s body temperature by 13 degrees Celsius (23 degrees Fahrenheit), or raise it by 8 degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit). A fully charged device should give you 24 hours of personal climate control.

The Reon Pocket weighs in at just under three ounces, so it shouldn’t be too much of a nuisance to wear in that undershirt pocket, especially if you’ve got heavier clothing to wear over it. The First Flight pitch page definitely plays up the appeal of wearing something like this under the kind of suit a person might wear to work.

It doesn’t, however, offer any options that cater specifically to female customers. That’s not to say a woman couldn’t wear the undershirt, but the pitch case makes it seem like men in business suits are the primary audience. Hopefully just for now.

The project is already fully funded just a few days after it launched. Pricing on First Flight starts at around $117, but again: it’s only available in Japan. It’s also not going to be shipped out until 2020. But as climate change plunges us into increasingly brutal summers, products like the Reon Pocket could be exactly the thing heat-sensitive folks like me end up leaning on to get by.