High Fashion Eyes Hi-Tech: Dresses That Know You’re Looking
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| SHOPPERS LIFESTYLE |
A Montreal-based fashion designer has created a pair of dresses that react to the viewer’s gaze by lighting up and moving on their own. Working with glow-in-the dark thread, structured plastic, and super-organza commonly used in costumes for the Paris Opera House and Europe’s top fashion brands, Ying Gao constructed the spotlight-loving dresses. “The gaze-activated dresses are embedded with eye-tracking technology that responds to an observer’s gaze by activating tiny motors to move parts of the dresses in mesmerising patterns,” Dezeen magazine explains. But that’s just the start: Once activated by the viewer, the dresses move in a pre-programmed fashion.
“Whether it is a direct visual contact or through a camera, the artistic concept of gaze has always appealed to me. Therefore, when my robotics designer Simon Laroche and I started working on
the project (no) where (now) here, we thought a lot about how to bring both the conceptual and technological level together,” Gao explains. Despite all the robotic technology, each dress weighs
no more than half a pound since super-organza is the world’s lightest frabic.
