By and large, our clothes don’t actively move. They’re simple pieces of fabric assembled to sit nicely on our bodies, and little more. [anoukwipprecht] created something a little more technological and confronting, though, with the Robotic Open-Source Scale Dress.
Right from the drop, you can see what the dress is all about. It’s an open-shoulder design that has eight large moving scales mounted on the front. These scales are printed, and each features its own servo for independent movement. The scale baseplates are designed to hide the servos themselves, creating a sleeker look that hides the mechanism underneath. Each baseplate is also perforated with holes, allowing it to be sewn on to the base garment in a stout fashion. The dress itself is created with thick neoprene fabric, enabling it to take the weight of the scale assemblies without sagging or pulling away from the body. You can even customize the scales in various ways—such as adding feathers instead.
The dress is a neat piece, and would catch eyes for its pointy scales alone. The fact that they can start moving at any time only increases the garment’s impact. We’ve seen some other great fashionable uses of 3D printing before, too, like these awesome printed shoes. Meanwhile, if you’re printing your own garments in your home lab, don’t hesitate to let us know! Or, even better… wear them to the next Hackaday event!
I find it extremely disingenuous to use quotes for “robotic” when describing an autonomously moving project like this, yet at the same time no quotes or the slightest sign of hesitation when describing remotely controlled cars with a knife strapped to them, or similar “robotic” projects.
Hmm. I tend to think of a “robot” as a thing that does a task, performs “work” that might otherwise be performed by a human. This dress, I myself think of more as kinetic art, so maybe I can see where the article author is coming from.
Does it help at all that it’s only in single quotes? Does that make it less quotey?
Does it help justify the use of quotes at all to know that the creator refers to it as a ‘SCALE DRESS’ (quotes included) in their own writeup?
:-)
This is definitely not a project I would have ever cooked up, but it is creative and interesting. I was impressed by the lack of sag in the scales. I suppose the neoprene fabric helps, but some work had to have gone into solving that issue.
Another standout is a thing that doesn’t stand out. The servos are well hidden. A nice detail. I wonder if burying them like that helps reduce the noise. Maybe they move slowly so they don’t make a lot of noise.
I may have just missed it, but didn’t see any discussion about what triggers the scales to move and what kinds of effects they create. Didn’t see a video showing that either, but I often don’t see what’s right in front of me.
Yeah, we couldn’t find much on this one either.
But Anouk gave a talk at Supercon a few years back where she talks about how some of her (now older) dresses work: https://hackaday.com/2017/11/21/anouk-wipprecht-robotic-dresses-and-human-interfaces/
Absolutely fantastic stuff.
It’s just punctuation, don’t take it so personally
Really amusing. It reminds me of an Asus router. A dress for warwalking or drone jamming.
No details on the dress construction though. I guess the focus of the project is the scales.
You’re right, it’s totally gaming router-chan