Via fashioning tech.
Created by Dutch FashionTech Designer Anouk Wipprecht, modeled in collaboration with Italian Architect Niccolo Casas, 3D printed at Materialise, and the awaited Intel Edison (announced at this years CES in Las Vegas) was incorporated into this garment to make it the smartest yet!
Anouk’s work tries to imagine how new high tech materials combined with smart sensors and actuators can impact the ways we connect, communicate and relate to one another. She believes technology will transform from the role of a ‘device’ towards functioning more as an integrated medium. As ‘wearable electronics’ like smart watches and trackers have fully arrived and it’s time to look at what more fashion has to offer, and the field of smart textiles and interactive garments have barely been explored. While there starts to arise more requests for ‘intelligent fashion’ from the consumer market, as noticed by the designer.
The Synapse Dress is an experiment between the wearer’s internal and external state, aimed at being ‘interactive fashion’ gone smart. this dress functions as an sensing garment, an dress based on bio-signals acting on the wearers behalf due to embedded sensors and actuators. Like Anouk’s other works, her over the top high-tech meets fashion style suits to a broad audience, to impress and ignite. But – the designer says – she also sees a very app-liable approach to the concept. As the dress logs your mood, and senses you far beyond one set of bio-signals only, the dress can become a little ecosystem which monitors your attitude, integrating the data from many sensors to put interaction back in the hands of the wearer, while co-evolving with the system around your body.
During Intel Development Forum 2014 (#IDF14) several different modes of interactions were explored on the Intel Edison micro-controller. The wearer was able to control the bright LEDs with manual control, remotely, with her mind, heart rate, and even proximity. She was able to capture photos and video during states of heightened concentration. These experiments with the participants and the data gathered inform a new series of connected and body sensing garments in the designers already impressive collection.
The dress headpiece is fitted with a sensor that tracks the wearers attention level. The Synapse Dress is aware of the wears heart rate via bluetooth. A wifi camera is controlled from the Edison micro controller to collect data about the wearers personal space when they are feeling anxious or in (dis)stress. An on-board web app collects and collate this data for review should the wearer want to know more about their emotional triggers, functioning as a ‘mood map’ of the wearer’s mind, and day.
The Synapse Dress is controlled from voice commands should the wearer want to express some of this sensor data or blast a person with 140W of blinding blue light if they come too close. These involuntary responds on the wearers behalf make for an interesting conversation about comfort while treasuring her personal space.
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