I’ve decided to go with the less impossible, more amusing of my two Wearables project ideas: The Party Dress.

Assignment: Project description

Write a description of your project (one page minimum) – describe what your prototype will look like, what it will do, and how it will be used. List your influences, goals, intended users, and provide a use scenario. If you haven’t decided on one project, write a full description for each project you are considering.

Here’s my silly write-up:

Concept

My proposed project for Wearables Studio is a Party Dress: a dress equipped with sensors and indicators that will encourage people to socialize with the wearer at parties, conferences, or other events where there may be a lot of people who don’t know each other but might wish to strike up a conversation. At its most basic, the dress will respond to proximity, encouraging people to approach the wearer and providing an easy ice-breaking topic. It will also, technology permitting, include a special cell phone pocket that visually indicates when the wearer has an incoming call, as this event is often impossible to detect in a room where music is playing. There could also be a panic button hidden on the dress that would directly trigger the lights on the phone pocket, so that the wearer could pretend to have a call, should she need a way to escape a conversation that is boring her or otherwise causing distress.

Description

The Party Dress will be sewn from Simplicity pattern 2491, a festive, cheerful style that was issued most likely in 1958. It has a plain bodice that will not be made too garish by the addition of lights; a full skirt that, especially with the help of a crinoline, will provide ample camouflage for a power supply; a wide box pleat down the front of the skirt that will provide a stable surface on which to mount a sensor; and a belt that can be used to hide switches or other controls.

The top of the bodice will bear a short-range infrared sensor (such as the Sharp GP2D12, which has a range of 4 to 30 inches) and two small clusters of RGB LEDs. When the wearer is engaged in close conversation, her interlocutor’s presence directly in front of her will cause the LEDs to light up. If the person steps too far away to be easily heard, the lights will dim or blink.

The bottom of the skirt will bear a longer-range infrared sensor (such as the Sharp GP2Y0A710YK0F, which has a range of 40 to 216 inches) and a ring of 20 to 30 more RGB LEDs. If no person or object is detected by either this or the short-range sensor, these lights will pulse or change color to attract attention from people across the room, encouraging them to come closer to see what on earth is going on.

By default, all the LEDs except those on the cell phone pocket will stay lit (though there will, of course, be an on/off switch for times when the wearer does not wish to attract attention, such as while riding the subway), and their color will contribute to the overall hue of the dress. If the fabric is light in color and reasonably sheer, they may be mounted on an underlining so that the fabric diffuses their light and takes on their colors more organically. All the lights may shift color depending on proximity or other factors, such as noise level, temperature, the ambient light level, or incline (in case the wearer is dipped by her dance partner, or—heaven forfend—faints). If the edge of the phone pocket is too far out of the wearer’s field of vision to be comfortably seen, its indicator lights may be mounted on the belt, instead.

Inspiration

The idea for this dress emerged from a conversation about wearable technology that I had in December 2008 with the mighty Erin McKean, proprietress of the website A Dress A Day and founder of the massive Vintage Sewing Patterns Wiki. In addition to being a great proponent of dresses, Ms. McKean is a frequent traveler and conferencegoer, and a charming conversationalist.

Intended Wearers

The Party Dress is intended for women who wish to make new acquaintances and are amused by fancy dress. It could function as an aid to the moderately shy, or to the intimidatingly beautiful, or to those who simply enjoy let their freak flags fly.

Use Scenario

A woman walks into a party where she does not know many people—say, one of those awkward parties that occurs on the opening night of a typography conference. As she looks around, trying to decide whom to try striking up a chat with, her dress begins to coruscate. Curious typographers begin to edge closer in order to determine whether this effect is a result of too much liquor, or whether that woman’s dress really is glowing. When they determine that the latter is more likely, they step forward to ask her what the blinking means. By this time, they have drawn close enough that the dress glows steadily. . . . Hours later, in the middle of the dance floor, the woman sees that her phone pocket is blinking. She steps aside to answer the call and discovers that it is almost midnight, and her pumpkin is waiting at the curb. She exchanges cards with her newfound friends, bids them goodbye, and exits, her dress starting to twinkle again as she heads for the cloak room.

* * *

Assignment: Paper prototype

Start thinking about and developing the physical form for your project. Using materials like cardboard, paper, muslin, and foamcore, experiment with size, shape, and placement of the different component parts of your design. The results won’t be functional, but they should represent as closely as possible the elements you plan to use.

Think through how the finished garment or piece will look and how it will be used. Use this time to develop your ideas about why and how the user will interact with the final prototype without the pressure of making it work – that comes soon enough. Come to class next week with your paper prototype and be prepared to talk about your design decisions.

Above is the PowerPoint slideshow that Diego made for our in-class presentation. There is also copious supporting material at the following locations:

• Photos, with lots of chatty comments
  
• Videos, interspersed with kittenage
• Arduino code
• Processing code
  • colors_highlight_new_swatch – this is the color palette module. It reads a text file containing all the colors in the appropriate Krylon spraypaint line and outputs them as a grid of colored squares. The active swatch and rolled-over ones are highlighted with colored borders. It’s glitchy, as you can see if you look in the upper left corner, but basically it works.
  • spraycans – I would like to make my own set of brushes, based on Diego’s, that are all the same style but in different sizes. These would then be mapped to the number of fingers being held up, with more fingers triggering a bigger spray cone. This would make it easier for users to get predictable, slightly repeatable results. Toward that end, I made a spraycan object whose spray cone, label number (for the size), and can color (for the paint) are variable. Epileptics should probably not view this sketch.
  • Main application – The “final” in “final_application_4″ refers to the this being our final project for the semester, not to the code itself actually being final. For, verily, it is not. This is the wrapper into which all the other modules will eventually be rolled. It’s a whole lot of nested if statements and functions. This program doesn’t run unless the glove is plugged in; I should fix that, to make it easier to check code while programming.

This is the second smidgen of the code for our final project. It pulls RGB values and color names from a tab-delimited text file (which is, itself, based on the actual Krylon color options) and outputs this grid of swatches. The swatches don’t do anything yet—just drawing them took me, like, two days, thank you very much, and that was with some very helpful help from Shawn. Partly this is because I apparently can’t keep in my head for more than thirty seconds how arrays and objects work, and partly it’s because I just. can’t. focus. And partly it’s because I apparently have no idea what the fuck I’m doing.

I’m beginning to really like Diego’s Plan B, as proposed over the weekend:

Fake our own deaths.

I keep telling myself I have to not panic and just write the code one piece at a time. Then, later, I can get somebody to help me put it all together, which is something I know I have no clue how to do. But just accomplishing what seem like they should be simple things is stumping me. Most recently, I was trying to get the swatch name to be displayed when a square is rolled over. This is not by any means an important feature—in fact, it doesn’t really serve any purpose. But I should be able to do it, and I can’t figure out why it doesn’t work. I keep getting errors like “The function showName() does not exist” or “Cannot find anything named ’swatches.’” Both of these things do, of course, exist, and I can’t see any reason why they wouldn’t be found.

I know it’s pretty rare for computers to just fuck up and much more common for me to do so, so I’m sure the answer is that I’ve done something really dumb and sloppy somewhere. But it could easily take me two hours to find that error, and every new goddamn line of code seems to cause some new mysterious issue. I can feel myself growing older just thinking about it. And there are a lot more lines of code to go. Here’s the stuff I was hoping to get done, oh, by, say, last Thursday:

And that’s not including the task of sewing us a new glove, for which I bought fabric on Monday, as well as a book about how to use my virgin four-year-old Juki serger. I know that’ll be fun once I get started, but I just can’t get started.

Maybe I need a drink.

So then . . . The other day I was talking about the glove project with my friend Rose, and I rhetorically asked what the hell this kind of low-fi, large-format drawing setup would be good for. Rose’s answer was immediate: graffiti.

Duh.

So then, what we need is just a limited palette of Krylon spray paints, and a couple of brush types—say, a fat marker and three sizes of spray patterns. And then, when I asked my perpetual question of “What are the other fingers doing?,” Diego had this brilliant idea: the number of fingers you’re using determines the brush size. Index finger for the marker; index and middle for a small spray nozzle; index, middle, and ring for a medium spray; and all four fingers for the biggest spray—what you’d use to fill. That’s a pretty intuitive mapping. We wouldn’t need to track motion on all the fingers, just whether they’re flexed or not. And we could use an accelerometer to register wrist tilts, somewhat like the Rock ‘n’ Scroll, to cycle through the color palette.

The thumb would remain an on/off switch.

We could have different backgrounds to paint on, like brick walls, subway cars, trucks.

Bitchen.

This idea is, in fact, so cool that it has already been done.

Developing . . .

Photo: ASBO by rubberdreamfeet / David Hayward. Some rights reserved.

Ever since we started putting the actual glove together, I’ve been thinking about how the software side of this project should take into account what I expect to be a pretty low-resolution input system. When I was making a drawing interface for what was purely an ICM project, I was assuming an average level of mouse dexterity. The stroke-width picker that I made last Wednesday, for instance, is obviously too small to be operated with our crude pointer.

So what kind of interface would work?

I did some Googling around, to get ideas of what kind of controls can be operated with little dexterity. In particular, I looked for things you can do while wearing mittens, since I figure that that’s approximately the level of control our hypothetical user will have. Some findings:

Some military radios are touted as being usable even while wearing Arctic mittens: “The desired frequency is set by four knobs on the side of the radio which can be operated even while the operator is wearing Arctic mittens, or in the dark by counting clicks from the end-stops” (”Clansman PRC-349 / RT-349 VHF Transceiver,” Armyradio.com). Its that idea of click feedback that I find interesting. If you’re choosing from a limited set of options—say, brush sizes— on a very small display, it’s not too annoying to cycle through them one at a time to get to what you want. This is the way my cell phone, toaster, and camera menus work. And they all provide beeps or clicks for feedback. What kind of feedback will we give to let our user know what’s going on?

Other physical controls that can be operated while wearing mittens include a camera’s zoom ring and aperture and shutter speed dials (Matthew G. Monroe, “How to Shoot in Freezing Temperatures and Keep Your Hands Toasty Warm,” digital-photography-school.com); Velcro closure tabs on outerwear; and KEYnetic’s rock ‘n’ scroll cell phone interface (via LyteByte).

On the screen side of things, some relevant input methods include Morse code and onscreen keyboards. Again, I like the simplicity of tapping, though I can also see uses for a matrix of a few very large buttons.

Obviously, with two weeks to go, I don’t have time to really get into learning interface design for this project, but I think where I’m going is toward a system that has a drawing mode and a tool selection mode. When you’re drawing, there’s nothing else onscreen except maybe one or two tools or hints—how to turn the drawing line off, how to activate the control menu. You can’t select these controls onscreen, because how would you do so without drawing a line all the way to the button? And whatever gesture you use to activate the menu must be able to be done without moving the drawing pointer.

The Rock ‘n’ Scroll model is pretty good for us within one mode or another, but you have to be able to switch between the two without moving your drawing pointer. So that would involve . . . the thumb? It’s possible, though not necessarily easy, to move your thumb without moving the rest of your hand. So maybe as long as your thumb is tucked in, the pen is on, and if you stick it out, the pen is off.

Once we’ve got a way to separate the two modes, I was thinking the control screen would be super-simple, with only one control editable at a time. So, something like this:

Photo: Elephant Painting by Venson Kuchipudi. Some rights reserved.

I finally managed to be in the same place at the same time as Diego, so we were able to make a work plan, go buy some supplies, and put together our first prototype of what now seems to be The Drawing Glove.

Well, actually, first, we were able to sit there scratching our heads over how to connect a flex sensor. I’ve had one of those things for months and never used it, because I could never figure out how it should be connected. So I looked online and found . . . lots of other glove projects using flex sensors. That’s okay, though—“This one is different—because it’s us.” I also found some inspirational photos of flex sensor connections.

People had warned us that these sensors break easily, and I’d read that they only last for a limited number of bends. I knew there was no way I could solder wires to one these without wrecking the whole damn thing, so I thought that for quick-and-dirty prototyping purposes, maybe I could just hold them together with electrical tape.

Yeah. Meanwhile, Sofia wandered over to ask what we were working on. She, too, was making a glove, and I took the opportunity to ask her how the hell she was attaching her flex sensors to wires. The answer: wire wrap. Okay, that makes sense. She also kindly revealed the location of the specific Radio Shack where she’d managed to find a wire-wrapping tool, but it turned out they had them (albeit somewhat hidden) at the store closest to school. So Diego went out and got us some enamel-coated magnet wire and a wrapping tool.

Man, I am never soldering anything, ever again. Wire wrapping is the way to go.

Diego had attached the flex sensor and LED to his original, flat prototype using Velcro, and we decided to stick with this approach (so to speak) for the glove version. So I borrowed a needle from Thomas and spent a ridiculously long time sewing tiny squares of black Velcro onto a black glove using black thread, in the inky darkness that is the central work area at ITP. The following photo is enhanced for your viewing ease; in reality, I could not at all see what the fuck I was doing:

Finally the wires were all wrapped, the Velcro was all attached, the alligator clips were clipped (yes, the wires we laboriously wrapped were too short; and your point is . . . ?), and we had a thing to test.

Hey! It lights up!

It even stays lit when you put it on! And the flex sensor turns the LED on and off!

As the video shows, we soon ran into some technical difficulties. I ended up tailor-tacking the sensor and all the wires down, so that they’d stop pulling out of place. But it kind of works! Amazing!

Onward. Next, we get to try to attach the remaining four sensors and LEDs. And we’ll probably want to eliminate some of those noisy wires, since flex sensors really don’t like them.

The final video is on YouTube.