2023-09-21 19:16:07
We are all cognitively busy. And we constantly say: I’m busy. Dutch fashion tech designer Anouk Wipprecht has now designed and 3D printed a dress with Onshape design software from PTC that responds to cognitive load via a brain-computer interface. So you see the clothing reacting to someone’s brain load.
The dress produced on an HP Multijet Fusion 3D printer therefore reflects the wearer’s brain activities. Fashion thus becomes a new kind of interconnection between people and their environment. This project shows the direct connection between your behavior and how your brain responds to it.
Unique interface between clothing and emotions
Interface learns from two minutes training session
These signals are picked up with a new advanced EEG sensor that forms a wearable brain-computer interface (BCI). The EEG sensor is a new 4-channel BCI headset called Unicorn Headband, developed by NeuroTech company g.tec with help from the designer. The interface uses Machine Learning to determine the mental workload. A two-minute training session is sufficient if the dress is worn for the first time. The workload is then displayed in real-time on the six circular displays that fan out from the neckline of the dress. As the mental load increases and reaches saturation point, each screen shows an iris and pupil that continues to dilate. This creates an alien spectacle with eyes.
We’ve gone a step further than before
With this creation, the designer has gone one step further than she has done in the past two decades. Anouk says: “What I have been trying to do for the past 20 years is to connect our bodies with electronics, robot (fashion) design and wearable interfaces. But what if we can connect technologically expressive garments with our bodies, body language and even emotions? What dialogues can we initiate in this way? This is what I explore with designs like this.”
Various design features in software
Anouk Wipprecht designed the dress with the help of the Onshape team PTC’s Onshape cloud-native productontwikkelingsplatform. The project took advantage of several Onshape design capabilities, including mixed modeling, generative design, render studio, and in-context design to reference hardware elements. “It was fun to use the rendering capabilities in Onshape,” said Anouk, “It helped me understand the look and feel of possible built-in LEDs and how light reflects on the body and the space around it. This added more drama and we were able to explore this digitally before we had to engineer and investigate it in real life.”
New nylon material for HP printer
The parts were printed by HP on a Jet Fusion 5420 3D printer with HP’s new HR 3D PA12-W materials. This is a nylon suitable for the production of high-quality functional parts. “The 3D printed parts were very light, like I have never experienced before, and perfect for a dress like this, because you don’t want to have heavy parts full of technology on your body,” says Anouk Wipprecht. She is also happy with the fact that the white parts do not discolour over time, nor do the mechanical properties change.
Anouk Wipprecht officially released the thought-controlled 3D printed dress during the Ars Electronica festival in Linz, Austria. The first prototype can be seen in it Museum for Image & Sound as a portable computer. You can admire the dress during the Eindhoven event on September 23 and 24 Maker Make.
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