Wearables Spring 18

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front of the jacket

back of the insulated jacket

details of jacket when worn

details of circuits when unworn

experiments with paper

Title: We Say Hi 

The outcome of this project is a green jacket as an insulator with a series circuit connecting muscle wires, battery pack (power), and the a switch. 

Since muscle wires tend to get hot and catch on fire easily, using felt to make a jacket can prevent the person who is wearing it from getting the skin burnt. The jacket is also mimicking a person’s skin since it’s supposed to cover the whole body; the color green relates to the color of the earth, primal and natural. 

When the switch is on, the wires stretch up as a gesture of waving. For someone who doesn’t like to greet people with hugs or handshakes, the wires saying hi can be an effective way to tell others our emotions. The switch can be turned on by either the people who are approaching us or the people who are wearing the jacket. 

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Hannah Tindal - Body Image Skirt 

While I was unable to get it fully working, it was designed to be hooked up to the digit displace and a touch sensor. The touch sensor would have connecting wires down to the distorted photos of the dolls. As a default, the display would show 30:36, the average waist and hip size of a woman. When touching the sensors, depending on which doll you touched, the display would then show the waist and hip size if the doll were life sized. All were connected to skirt.

Average woman:

Waist: 30″

Hip: 36″

Barbie:

Waist: 18″

Hip: 33″

Monster High Doll:

Waist: 12″

Hip: 14″

Bratz:

Waist: 15″

Hip: 39″

Fashionista Barbie (new Barbie line with more realistic bodies):

Waist: 24″

Hip: 36″

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Scott McKinney, Ankle Monitor for Internet of Things

This ankle mounted thermal printer prints the top trending post from pastebin.com once every 10 minutes. Operating as an opposite to internet connected home assistants like Amazon alexa and Google Home, the ankle monitor invites a certain portion of the internet into the home space. pastebin originated as a site for programmers to quickly share code snippets, but has quickly evolved into an information leaking platform due to its robust feature set for anonymous users.  The ankle monitor has printed everything from javascript code for popular travel websites to leaks of game assets for popular multiplayer videogames to linkedin password leaks.

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Veiled Connections - Soleil Kohl

This project explores relationships and connection in intimacy and eye contact. It uses a line infrared sensor that sends signals of whether or not the line is broken or unbroken. Each of the two abstract headpieces has either the sender or receiver, and both are designed to represent unique personality traits and power dynamics in relationships.

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Cherish Marquez - BoarderLand Interface

Wearables Project #2 - BoarderLand Interface - Neckwear

I designed this piece to be a wearable sculptural object in correlation with a game I created in unity. The unity game is called Cognitive Distortions and is about exploring a landscape within the mind. I composed the music for the unity game and designed the various landscapes within the game itself. The Circuit Playground Express controls the mouse and the sensors control the keyboard that makes the player’s movement. The sensors are printed in a conductive 3D filament of the landscapes that I grew up in. The terrains are Las Cruces, NM, El Paso, TX, and Sierra Blanca, TX. The player explores the landscape triggering music that guides the narrative along with their journey. Mental Illness is a prominent issue within our society, the issues stem from stigma surrounding those who suffer from their disability. I created this game to imitate the relationship I have with the thoughts that stem from my lived experiences and to provide an awareness of an invisible struggle. 

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Emily Rehwald, Project 2, Cat Call Headband

For project 2, I wanted to make a cat call headband, that responds to different sound frequencies/pitches, representing the different “cat calls” that woman experience. For the low frequencies, I made the headband purr at you, representing regular conversation voice levels. For medium frequencies, I made the headband growl, as a sort of warning and uneasiness. For high frequencies, I made the headband howl, the high frequency representing the classic cat call whistle that is so commonly known. 

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Don’t Touch Fabric Patch / Kelsey Drake

I decided to try and weave touch conducive fabric. The final piece is two sections of woven fabric each with a strip of conductive thread woven together. A circuit was created with a couple leds, a small battery pack, conductive thread, and small snaps woven into the fabric to increase the surface area of connectivity to the woven conductive thread. With velcro on the back, the user can disconnect and attach the fabric anywhere they don’t wish to be touched. 

The finished product is sort of finicky. when the two pieces of fabric were sown together some sort of insulator (I used tape) had to be placed on the edges where the strip of conductive thread is so that the circuit isn’t always complete.

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Heartbeat | Emily O’Rourke | Wearables Project 2

Heartbeat is a hands-free video game that considers the innate physical inactivity involved in playing video games. It’s the antithesis of a Wii Fit.

The player wears a heart rate monitor that is seamlessly integrated into a hoodie. When the player connects their hoodie to the heart-shaped dock built into the chair, the game automatically begins analyzing their resting heart rate.

A higher resting heart rate means they win the video game, but pop up windows obscure the game and warn the player of increased medical risks associated with their resting heart rate. This calls into question the nature of winning: is winning worth it when it means you might be at a disadvantage in real life?

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Fidget Glove - Peter Valesares - Wearables Project #2

For my final project I used two flex sensors saudered onto an Adafruit Playground Express.  The Fidget Game starts with the rainbow spiral spinning around in a circle, the objective is to flex the finger sensors when the top of the spiral is on pin#7, pin#8, or pin#9.  When doing so the rate at which the colors spin becomes faster, however do not flex too early or else the spiral will slow down, the spiral will also slow down if you do not flex at all after one full rotation.  The goal of the game is to get the lights going so fast that they turn off (difficulty can be set with changes in code).  I made this project from inspiration from the classic arcade game in which one must stop  a light spinning in a circle on a certain spot, mixed with somewhat of a fidget spinner aspect.  This project is meant to help people with attention deficit disorder or anyone who wants to increase their reaction time!  I did have to remove two of the flex sensors due to conflicting BEND_RESISTANCE values in my code.

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Sarai Levinson 

This is a modular flower that heats up with a heating pad placed in the center when touching the center petals. The blue painted fabric is heat reactive and changes from blue to light blue/white when heated. It has an attached strap to allow it be placed cross body or around your body, however it is comfortable to you.

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Touch Light | Ryan Downes | Wearables Project 2

Touch light is a glove wearable which allows the user to turn on 4 different colored lights based on simple hand movements. by completing a circuit and triggering a light, the user will be able to communicate through hand gestures and send four different signals such as yes (green) no (red) maybe (yellow) and repeat (blue). With limited mobility, people will be able to visually communicate without even opening their mouths.

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Touch Light | Ryan Downes | Wearables Project 2

Touch light is a glove wearable which allows the user to turn on 4 different colored lights based on simple hand movements. by completing a circuit and triggering a light, the user will be able to communicate through hand gestures and send four different signals such as yes (green) no (red) maybe (yellow) and repeat (blue). With limited mobility, people will be able to visually communicate without even opening their mouths.

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Sorry I’m On Break - Jacob Villa - 4.8in x 4in x 3in

The main focus of this 3D printed wearable was to provide a way for workers in the service industry to not be bothered while they are on their break. With my experience in the service industry I felt something like this was long overdue. When working in the service industry, customers are not always the most polite. With this device the worker will not have to engage this potentially unappealing person while they are on their well deserved break. This also allows the wearer to display they are on the job and ready to help, and not appreciating the limited time to themselves they get during the workday. Flipping between the two is as easy as flipping a switch! To get the device to turn on, the back panel, that is secured by latches created in the 3D CAD model, must be removed and a button on the battery case needs to be pushed. This can all be seen in the video at : https://vimeo.com/273460975

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Mouse Glove//Jakob Schlottman//Wearables Project #2

For my final project I wanted to look at how we interface with technology, how we can remove layers of interface, and what the overall effect of removing those layers is.

Initially I bought a $10 Logitech mouse with the intention of hacking it apart, figuring out how it worked, and melding that with the glove in a similar manner as the final product represents. I did not know how LED mice worked, and unfortunately there was no way for me to manually trigger the impulse for U/D/L/R/LC/RC on the mouse board itself, it was all handled on the computer chip and sent wirelessly to the USB dongle. Tough luck, but I had some other ideas.

After doing some research I discovered a program called NeatMouse, a mouse movement emulator where directions and clicks can be bound to key presses instead of an actual mouse. So I went out and bought a $25 wireless keyboard and hacked it apart. I had to map 7 different pins, one of which (the thumb pin) had to be the mother pin for the other 6.

With that finished came the biggest roadblock -- turns out that board had some sort of anti-solder glaze, and not wanting to burn out the board or render the pins useless, I had to try some other methods of making a connection. Copper tape proved not to be conductive enough, and wires were too heavy to stay on the board with just electrical tape holding them down. Ultimately, the solution was to take strands of conductive thread and try to tape them onto exactly the right pin without touching other pins or each other. As soon as I had it working once I wrapped the thread around the board once and taped it down so that any tugs wouldn’t be applied directly where the threads were touching the pins.

After I stitched conductive thread pads into each finger and on the side of the pointer and middle fingers down to the back of the hand and attached the board, I had a working, wireless mouse glove that I have been terrified to touch since I finished it.

As it stands, touching your thumb to each of other four finger tips and the side of the index and middle finger controls one of the six mouse actions -- Up, Down, Left, Right, Left Click, and Right Click. These can be rebound, and the speed at which the pointer moves can also be changed through NeatMouse.

Overall this was a super fun project, despite the roadblocks and pivots. Hopefully it works tomorrow!

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Wearables Project #2 - Mariana Mask - 7″ x 6″ x 4″

Current events have shown us the dire situation that we have put ourselves in. Recently, the world received its first reports of plastic waste being found in The Mariana Trench. This wearable project, entitled The Mariana Mask, was created in response to this devastating news. The piece is meant to represent a diver's mask and has been 3D printed in two parts: "the lens" out of PLA and "the gasket" out of NinjaFlex. "The lens" was printed to hold a 5-inch screen that is hooked up to a Raspberry Pi 3 and a USB webcam. Through the use of p5.js and some basic programming, an application was created to run a sketch on the device. It provides the wearer with a live view of their surroundings, albeit an underwater representation, and each time a person tweets about plastic and the ocean a plastic object begins to float around the screen. These objects have been given the same half-life of their real-life counterparts; most take around 400 years to decompose. As more and more tweets occur, more and more plastic waste begins to cloud the user's view with the intention of drawing attention to this horrific position we now find ourselves in.

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Pictures of prototype / experiment with soft circuit 

Project 1: Push Me Away - Mia Zheng

Video: https://youtu.be/TLKboZAe2kQ

This project, Push Me Away, is designed to use beeping sound to politely ask people that you don’t like to keep a certain distance from you. Visually, the exposed wires and circuit board suggests the very primal state of a cyborg and how he/she might approach the world and interact with people, and further help create a better living environment. Wouldn’t it be nice that we all keep our distance before we all get to know each other? 🙃

The other two objects mainly serve the decorative purposes. The LED light, which is sewed with conducted thread, can be pinned / snapped on the Arduino to light up whenever you want it to light up. If not, you can pin it on your hair. The Arduino circuit board on the other side is an earring in this case. When it’s hot, it turns blue to calm people down. When it’s cold, it turns red to warm up a little visually. 

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This is the physical version of wearing your heart on your sleeve. These sleeves are joined by a neopixel strip controlled by a circuit playground express on the wrist of the right sleeve. You can change the light pattern of the light between 6 different ones. By flipping the switch on the circuit you will see the lights on the circuit switch from a red rotation to a blue rotation. This allows the wearer to change the brightness of the lights. They were made to bring light to how some people in the LGBTQ community are discriminated against in areas around the world. Love is everywhere and should be able to be seen by all.