Wearable forest

Ryoko Ueoka, Hiroki Kobayashi and Michitaka Hirose created this beautiful piece titled Wearable Forest from University of Tokyo and I can't get enough of it! This gorgeously delicate and illuminating dress interacts bio-acoustically with a remote forest. Lights are integrated into the fabric and their illuminations react to wildlife around the world through a wireless link connected to the internet. Real-time data and sound streams from the internet to the dress.

The beauty of this piece is that it expands beyond a single garment into one that is an ecosystem by enabling real-time environmental data from the web to interact with it. This provides a unique connection to nature and opens up the possibilities of "a completely new dimension of how clothing design can interact, react and merge with the environment," source via Talk2MyShirt.

See a video of the dress in action here.

A garment that twitters baby's kicks

Corey Menscher, a student at New York University's ITP program, created KickBee. The project is a wearable device that pregnant women wear as it senses the baby's kicks, which then get turned into messages. The wearable device is made of a stretchable band, sensors, and an Arduino Mini microcontroller that sends signals to an accompanying Java application wirelessly via Bluetooth. The signals then get translated into a message that is automatically posted on the microblogging site, Twitter.

What I like about this project is the usefulness of the concept and the extension of the garment into additional products such as Twitter. By connecting it to Twitter, the device becomes an ecosystem that senses and communicates via its own network.

View the twitter feed here.

Dressing in technology

Jean-Baptiste Labrune, Dana Gordon, Michel De Meere, and Dirk Van Oosterbosch hosted a workshop called Designing Hybrid Wearables at Mediamatic in Amsterdam. The workshop aims to focus on merging communication technology with the things you wear. Here's how they describe it:

"More and more objects are being connected to networks, and become carriers, collectors, and transmitters of various kinds of data. ... We're not just talking about pimping your outfit - we're investigating the electronic extrapolation of the role of clothing and fashion. And we're looking at transferring possibilities of other communication devices to clothing, where they may find a more natural home..."

The topics they explored ranged from clothes as media, social possibilities of RFID technology, tangible interfaces, conductive materials, and seamlessly integrating communication technology into garments.

Hand-recording your experiences

Valeria Fuso has designed Jik, a glove that records your experiences by capturing video, images and sound in the context of where you are. Fuso is brilliantly exploring natural gestures as the interface that triggers recording actions such as holding your hand in the shape of a circle up to your eye, which tells the glove to begin recording an image and holding your hand up like signing the number "5" to tell the glove to record sound.

The idea of using natural gestures to trigger actions is ripe with opportunities. Now that this version is complete, I wish to see Jik implemented into something other than a glove so that it is more seamlessly integrated into the things we do and wear. In other words, what if Fuso's natural gestures were implemented into a full-fledged garment?

Imagine a garment that understands the direction you turn, if you are bent or sitting, if your arms are lifted or not, the elevation your cuffs are in, if it's buttoned up or not... How can this idea be pushed further into a more seamlessly integrated solution where the technology is more discrete and hidden?

Visualizing the invisible

Agneilli Davide, Buzzini Dario, and Drori Tai at the now-closed Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, collaborated on exploratory projects that investigate the three-dimensionality of hertzian space. One of their projects called Fashion Victims, makes visible the space that surrounds us and the radiation that permeates it.

The project is implemented in a collection of garments including soft hats, shirts and bags that detect surrounding cell phone signals. The garments then “bleed” depending on the strength of the signal that results in changing the garment’s color. Each piece is meant to react once until it is completely saturated.

The implementation focuses on the “complex aesthetics” (as they describe) by seamlessly integrating technology into the form and textiles of the garments.