C.K. Sample, left, wearing an Oculus Rift, a virtual reality headset, reaches for an object envisioned by William Hurley, who is wearing an Emotive EEG Brain Computer Interface. The system — developed at Chaotic Moon, a company that designs wearable technology — enables Hurley to envision an object into Sample's 3-D environment and to manipulate objects he's thinking about in that space.

The digital domain is creeping off our desktops and onto our bodies; from music players that match your tunes to your heart beat and mood sweaters that change color depending on your emotional state.

At Chaotic Moon Studios, an Austin, Texas, mobile software firm, developers and engineers are working on a way to compete with Google Glass — eyewear that can log onto the Internet. And they’re designing other wearable projects for several other customers.

Chaotic Moon co-founder William Hurley said wearable technology will have as much of an impact as the smartphone revolution did a few years ago.

“I think we’re about to enter a whole new phase in the next 12 months — 16 months probably on the outside,” he said. “There’s going to be a whole new phase. It’s just like when the iPhone came out, and there was this mad gold rush. ”

Another Austin mobile developer, Mutual Mobile, is working on Google Glass applications for a variety of clients. They include doctors who might use the glasses to pull up patient information, and warehouse employees who could use them to look at real-time inventory or scan bar codes.

“People are starting to get into it,” said Sam Gaddis, the company’s chief marketing officer.

Gaddis says connected devices of all types are the future — because sensors that can measure a variety of data are becoming so cheap.

Mutual Mobile has hosted “hackathons” to encourage its developers to see what they can invent.

After one recent event, its developers created a football with a sensor that can detect the quality of the throw and a boxing game that measures how you’ve hit the target.

Adding sensors to everyday objects “is just adding this new layer of data that didn’t exist before,” Gaddis said.

Experts say that wearables are the next big thing in tech.

“Everyone agrees the race is just beginning, and I think we’re going to see some very, very big leaps in just the next year,” tech entrepreneur Manish Chandra said at a wearable technology conference and fashion show in San Francisco that was buzzing with hundreds of developers, engineers and designers.

Wearable technologies have long been a sideshow to mainstream laptop and smartphones, but this year Google’s glasses and rumors of Apple’s iWatch are popularizing the field. Analysts forecast swift growth. Last year the market for wearable technology totaled almost $9 billion. That should climb to $30 billion by 2018, said analyst Shane Walker at IHS Global Insights.