Webelow Wear

Inspired by the French fairy tale “Peau d’Âne”, Valerie Lamontagne is taking interactive wearables to new fashionable heights. The tale is of a widowed king who promises his dying wife to only marry a woman equal in her beauty and attributes.  The princess was the only qualified candidate and fearing a strange living situation, conspires with her fairy godmother to request a list of impossible demands of the King: a dress the color of the sky, a dress the color of the moon, a dress as bright as the sun, and finally, the hide of his marvelous donkey.

No gold-pooping donkeys here, but the dresses are friggin’ fierce. Lamontagne turns fantastical ideas into wearable creations using real time reactions to changing weather conditions.

The “Sky Dress” uses 14 tiny fans  linked to a  weather station to respond to the variation in wind speed and direction. Pockets of air expand in the parachute fabric to create an image of wind movement.

The “Moon Dress” conveys the changing phases of the moon using 14 glowing flowers that change color accordingly.

The 128 LED’s react to fluctuations in ultraviolet and solar radiation in the “Sun Dress”.  The lights flicker on and off, imitating the varying intensity of the sun.

Our vote: we likey.

Via [Ecouterre]

We want to give a quick nodd to Calvin Harris’ Humantesizer. We saw links to this on IheartSwitch and talk2myshirt but it wasn’t until we saw it the next day on DailyMotion that we had to mention this cool project.

Calvin, a musician from across the pond, worked with his electronics friends and some bathing suit beauties to make an orchestra using conductive paint and conductive pads connected to Arduinos. This is right up our shaded alley of coolness.

For a bit of a technical explanation, the pads on the floor are painted with conductive materials and connected to Arduinos as input switches. The people are “wired” with body-safe conductive paint from Bafe Condutive. The wire runs from a foot to a hand on either side, making each person able to switch two different devices at a time.

When a person stands on a pad and touches painted hands with a person on another pad, a circuit completes and the Arduino sends signals to Max/MSP, which is a program that can connect real-world circuits to music synthesizer programs.

We didn’t know about conductive paint until the Berkeley workshop but now we’re looking into making some controlled thermochromic designs using conductive paint on either side of a semi-conductive layer. We’re still a bit new to the concept but screen printing circuits is probably much easier than sewing.

We hope to see more human orchestras in the future. If you have footage, please send it to info@webelowwear.com.

So friends, be warned. When the next youtube party has lost it’s kick, we will be whipping out the conductive paint and making some Webelow music.

WW