If you are familiar with the Burning Man event, you know one of the important details is being visible at night on the Playa. Maker Shy Peleg of Tel Aviv, Israel created the perfect cape calling it a “living rainbow”. It makes use of a material embedded with channels of tiny fiber optics. With the addition of LEDs and an Arduino, the fibers take on beautiful hues resulting in a lightweight cape perfect for the “pack light” desert affair. I’m glad Shy took a shot of the detail at the edge of the cape as you can really notice the bands of color. I have a small swatch of fiber optic fabric that I’ve played with at a hackathon (it became a shroud for an Arduino-Bot). It allows a small space for the insertion of an LED to provide light through the fibers. However, you can cut the area where the fibers join and separate them to attach to different LEDs so that the fabric has the ability to glow multiple colors at once. You can also do some special effects by using sandpaper to allow more light to shine through the fibers. It’s a very creative medium and I’m sending out emoji flowers to Shy for his beautiful Burning Man outfit. If you are also interested in going to the big event and would like ideas for outfits, check out our EL Wire Animal Masks. They are fun glowing shapes fashioned on bicycle helmets. What animal would you like to embody at the place that encourages radical self expression?

Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!