This Bank Holiday
weekend everyone is dressing up in red white and blue or so the shops would
have it….here’s an alternative piece of
fancy dress, one that appeals to me .
At Victoria University of Wellington in the School of Design, that's in New Zealand ! they run a module as part of their
Wearable Technology course which they call 'FIREFLIES AND
LIGHTNING BUGS' . In
this project students create a wearable garment or accessory that lights up /
blinks / glows / pulsates / radiates. They do this using the Arduino Lilypadmicrocontroller which is designed specifically
for use with fabrics.
After learning the basics of electronics and Arduino
programming students must conceive and realise ‘a functioning wearable with
embedded, reactive light component’. As an erstwhile slide librarian I like
this one by Emily Steel which she calls the Little Slide Dress and describes here:
The
Little Slide Dress ….draws inspiration from classic movies and the ‘magic of
film’ to create a wearable piece of technology and art. ….With film we only see
what really is going on once the lights go out. For this to work there needs to
be a balance of projected and ambient light something the Little Slide Dress
tries to emulate. The dress is constructed out of individual slide film images
that are backed with LED’s. An Arduino Lilypad connected to a light sensor
controls the brightness of the LED’s. The sensor reads the how much ambient
light there is and uses this value to determine if the LED’s will be off or on.
When there is lots of light the LED’s are off and it looks like a shiny black
dress with small hints that something else is going on. Once the sensor
determines there is the right amount of light for LED’s to be seen in their
full brightness it turns them on. When the dress is on the lights slowly pulse
and the images on the dress come alive.
