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A digital 'dress' sold for $9,500
Ever bought clothes primarily to impress your online friends? Now you might just get the chance to buy clothes that exist solely online. Dutch startup The Fabricant, Dapper Labs and artist Johanna Jaskowska recently sold a digital dress, Iridescence, for $9,500 on the blockchain. It's not like buying a costume in a video game -- the creators will 'tailor' it for you based on a photo, and its nature as a blockchain asset both makes it unique and gives it value like cryptocurrency. It's also based on 2D patterns used for conventional clothes, so you could theoretically create a real life equivalent.
IBM supercomputer helped design a dress it can never wear
IBM's supercomputer can already knock up a meal, pick out a gift and know if you're feeling a bit depressed. Now, Watson is going to show the world that it can also do a passable job as a fashion designer for Marchesa. IBM teamed up with the New York-based outfitter to produce a "cognitive dress," a data-driven garment that's meant to show off what Watson can do. With the aid of Marchesa's creatives, the machine suggested a color scheme for the outfit, helped narrow down the fabric choices and assisted with the LED lighting scheme. Yes, it's got LEDs embedded into the material, which shall change color depending on Watson's sentiment analysis of social media during the 2016 Met Gala.
Intel's conceptual Adrenaline Dress gets upset when you do
Intel tapped Chromat to make its weird and wonderful Adrenaline Dress. Packing Intel's Curie computing module, the garment senses differences in adrenaline, based on your skin conductivity. A network of elaborate 3D-printed panels and a carbon-fiber skeleton then expands outwards, like a mutant porcupine had wings. Interestingly, there's no airpump or servos: it uses alloys that expand and contract to heat that are responsible for the movement. It's another design concept, but this one means to showcase its Curie module, while 2014's spider nightmare focused on RealSense. Curie is a more realistic proposition when it comes to smart garments -- because it's, well, tiny. Photos by Will Lipman.
Intel Curie opens vents in Chromat's sports bra to keep you cool
Experimental clothing studio Chromat unveiled its Spring/Summer 2016 collection over the weekend, and it includes a 3D-printed dress that expands as your adrenaline rises, plus a cool new sports bra. That's literally cool. Both garments are powered by Intel Curie, a tiny, low-power base for responsive consumer and industrial wearables.
Happy net neutrality day! Here are some llamas and a dress
Where were you the day the internet was freed from ISP tyranny? Apparently, you were either watching two llamas on the lam or tweeting that a clearly black and blue dress was actually gold and white. When two escaped camelids sent a Phoenix sheriff's posse on a Benny Hill chase, it spawned a million GIFs and seemed a perfect capper to a momentous day. But then, someone posted a picture of a dress on Tumblr that, due to a trick of light, appeared to be either black and blue or gold and white. Before you could say "rods and cones" the story went insane, with over 20 million views on Buzzfeed. So while some may wring their hands about the dumbing down of the internet, we say, enjoy it! Here are some of the best tweets, GIFs and Vines below -- you can always get serious later. (By the way, the dress is blue and black.)
3D-printed robotic spider dress keeps creeps at bay
Silk? Meh. Taffeta? Blergh. When it came time to craft her latest dress, Dutch artist Anouk Wipprecht instead turned to 3D printing and one of Intel's teensy Edison modules for something truly special. The end result? A "spider" dress that leaps to defend its wearer when it senses motion. (Our internal pedants would point out that the six legs make it more of an insect dress than a spider dress, but we digress).
Lady Gaga hits the stage in a multicopter flying dress (video)
Lady Gaga just made a spectacular album debut entrance -- even for her -- in what can only be described as a astronaut dress-cum-hexacopter that she named "Volantis." Though we'd call it a colossal publicity stunt, Gaga said that the suit was symbolic of herself and would allow her to be the voice for the youth of the world.... or something. While skimming across a stage in an oversized flying toy looks pretty bonkers (as you can see in the video after the break), fortunately the whole thing came off without a hitch.
No Comment: Rovio exec's wife dresses up Angry Birds style
In these pics over at the Hollywood Reporter, you can clearly see Peter Vesterbacka, the CEO of Rovio, who you may remember from his speech earlier this year at GDC 2011. The woman he's pictured with is none other than his wife, Teija Vesterbacka, who, according to the pictures, looks like a very lovely and elegant woman. The two look like they're about to have a very good time at a very fancy dinner, which is called the Castle Ball at the Finnish Presidential Palace, a formal event to celebrate Finland's Independence Day. The dress that she's wearing, however, clearly modeled after the big red Angry Bird? Well -- no comment.
Microsoft's designing women want to dress you up in wearable tech love (video)
Microsoft's no slouch when it comes to market expansion, with personal computing, mobile and even gaming under its Redmond wing -- but fashion? Well, it's time for pigs to fly because two of MS' very own took home Best Concept and Best in Show for their Printing Dress creation at the 15th Annual International Symposium on Wearable Computers. The dress, created by MS Research's Asta Roseway and the Xbox division's Sheridan Martin Small, incorporates a laptop, projector, four circuit boards and laser-cut, typewriter-shaped buttons into a black and white rice paper design. Wondering what all the gadgetry is for? Stressing the need for accountability in our age of anonymous, digital communication, the duo's winning entry aims to have us all wearing what we tweet -- literally, as messages typed via the bodice-sewn keys display on the gown's lower half. It might seem a far-fetched goal now, but these "eRenaissance women" hope to lure tech back from the "cold, unyielding" brink and into the warmth of a "human age." Jump past the break for a video peek at this ethical couture.
Adafruit's iCufflinks pulsate with the power of your Mac love
Men have struggled for millennia to find the most immediate visual signifiers for their wealth and status. Adafruit Industries has now added to their list of choices with a set of iCufflinks that disposes with the metaphors and speaks of power literally -- by featuring a pair of power buttons. It's not enough to merely cast some Mac-inspired On / Off switches out of aluminum, however; Adafruit has also inserted LED lights within the iCufflinks, which can be programmed to pulsate to your chosen rhythm. Because keeping it classy and LEDs go so well together. If you've got $128 to splash out on a pair of eminently prestigious shirt adornments, the source link is where you'll want to head. And keep an eye out for the upcoming necklace version -- it'll be available to suave ladies and gents everywhere in the summer.
The Soapbox: The unfairer sex
Disclaimer: The Soapbox column is entirely the opinion of this week's writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of Massively as a whole. If you're afraid of opinions other than your own, you might want to skip this column. Talking about the representation of women in video games is usually an exercise in depression. You don't have to search very hard for negative examples; consider The Witcher, in which sleeping with women is treated essentially as some sort of ersatz Pokémon variant. Or take a look at Grand Theft Auto III, hailed as a groundbreaking game, which featured a grand total of three female characters in the story, all of whom were painted as some combination of promiscuous, stupid, or untrustworthy. Comparatively speaking, MMOs deserve a medal for being remarkably open to both players and characters of both genders. And yet that's damning with faint praise in the worst way. MMOs still leave a lot to be desired when it comes to how they handle women, in ways both subtle and searingly obvious. Female characters are generally expected to be in a state of perpetual undress, more often than not without a significant role in the storyline -- and precisely because the genre is so far ahead of its contemporaries, complaints are often met with eye-rolling and derision.
Charlie Bucket creates fantastic lighted dress with knitted tubing and a pump, Veruca Salt demands ten
Charlie Bucket is a household name in some parts, and not just because he's a Roald Dahl character. No, the one we're talking about creates fantastic creations with tubing and light. The above Fluid Dress is composed of 600 feet of knitted tubing and it's powered by a pump which is worn as a backpack. Now, we don't know how heavy said rucksack is, and the dress is a bit short for our tastes, but we hear that Kate Middleton is searching far and wide for the perfect threads for her nuptials, so... can we make a suggestion? Honestly, we're just glad that the art of knitting hasn't died off in the high tech era. Check out the video below.
Pseudomorph dress is just begging for your pocket protector (video)
We're not going to pretend to understand haute couture. But when Anouk Wipprecht hooks up a nine-volt battery to a dress for the purpose of dribbling ink down the front from a pneumatic udder octet, well, you've just caught the attention of card-carrying nerds everywhere.
Video shows CCP's incredible cloth and hair simulation
We've known for some time that CCP planned to use physics simulation to make the clothes in EVE Online's Incarna expansion and their upcoming World of Darkness MMO more realistic. They even gave a talk on using NVidia's APEX cloth simulation at the 2010 Game Developer's Conference. Until now, all we've seen are technical details and the occasional screenshot, which makes it hard to work out how the end product will look. NVidia have released a new video this week of CCP's cloth simulation in action, giving those of us that are interested a sneak peak at the incredibly impressive results. Although APEX cloth simulation will be introduced to EVE when Incarna is released, the video looks much more like something out of World of Darkness. As an added bonus, the system seems to simulate realistic hair and not just clothes. Hair in most MMOs has always been limited to shorter styles which would look alright without animation. The ability to simulate complex clothes and long hair styles make character customisation in World of Darkness and EVE's Incarna expansion look very promising. Skip past the cut to watch the video in HD. [Thanks for the tip, Patrick!]
Synaptics driver enables multitouch gestures on older trackpads
Haven't updated your laptop's trackpad driver lately? Then you may well want to consider doing so, at least if your laptop is equipped with a Synaptics trackpad. As a user on the Hardware Zone forums discovered, the latest Synaptics driver seems to enable multitouch gestures on older laptops that didn't previously support them, including two-finger scrolling, and three-finger click. What's more, while the drivers themselves come from HP, they should work just fine on other laptops with a Synaptics trackpad. Hit up the link below to try it out for yourself.
Diffus pollution dress is turned on by CO2, prefers a clean environment
We've seen LED-laced dresses before -- though sometimes we'd rather we hadn't -- but this one here is almost refined enough for us to consider wearing. Stitched together using conductive embroidery, hundreds of LEDs are connected to a CO2 detector and react to its input with anything from a slow pulsating glow to a blinking signal of doom. No mention of Morse code messages, unfortunately, but this is run by an Arduino chip -- which means programming malleability (read: near-limitless possibilities) should be built in. Just know that when you see the next Bond girl communicating with Daniel Craig via her haute tech outfit, we had the idea first. A closeup of the dress and processor awaits after the break.
Dress lit up with 24,000 LEDs, perfect for your next formal rave
In general, we've found the whole LED dress craze to be kind of a snoozer -- after all, the results are usually pretty tacky, in our opinions. It seems, however, that all that has just changed -- with the introduction of Cute Circuit's Galaxy Dress, which is made of silk and has 24,000 LEDs measuring just 2 by 2-millimeters each embroidered onto its surface. As you can see from the photograph, the dress is also quite classic and beautiful -- not your usual raver's delight. To make the dress lighter and more flexible than your average light-enhanced couture, the designers used layers of organza crinoline and silk chiffon, and they power the dress with many small iPod batteries, which are light and easily hidden in the dress. The Galaxy Dress is currently on exhibition at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago -- but you can check it out for yourself in the video after the break. [Via Wired]
Fan-made Draenei Barbie
Reader Amanda S sent us this picture of a Draenei Barbie (that is a Draenei, right? Not a Night Elf? Oh yeah -- check the hooves) she says she and a friend made when they were bored. It's not the most involved craft we've ever seen, but it looks pretty good and it's an interesting idea: make Warcraft characters out of existing dolls, rather than completely from scratch. GI Joe would probably be perfect for putting together a figure of the new King Wrynn. But we do like the dress and the shoulders -- nice job. Whenever Blizzard figures out how to do player housing, we can put her in a dream house as well.Got a WoW-related craft that you'd like to share? We'd love to see it -- send us a tip through the tipline and we'll check it out.
PS3 Fanboy hands-on: dress
You might think that something called dress is all about frills, plunging necklines and eating disorders, but that's really only half the story. There's more to the modestly named paid service from Japan, including some rather odd yet somehow relevant mini-game tie-ins (you know, stuff that actual gamers care about). And from the looks of things, there's only going to be more coming.So, dress in a nutshell is part fashion sim, part clothing ad and part mini-game collection. It's an interesting mix to say the least; however, after having "played" with it for awhile, it's a combination that just doesn't seem to work. In retrospect, it's still very much a young service which will be expanding with new content as time goes by, though there are still so many missing elements to this service that could've made it a great addition to something like Home. All in all, it's one great experiment and we're interested in the concept of this unique collaborative effort. Hopefully you're still with us on this and reading on to find out more as we go inside dress. That ... that doesn't sound right.%Gallery-42244%
PlayStation dress collaborates with PUMA by Mihara Yasuhiro
One would assume anything named dress would at least involve a dress, but not so in this case, at least not yet. Announced late last year, dress is an "interactive fashion magazine" that will allow fashionistas to check out the latest apparel from real designers. What differentiates dress from more traditional publications is that it will contain "true to life representation of fashion models" and will also "simulate all fabrics and color options" for each piece of clothing and allow users to combine them. Eventually, it will even allow budding fashion designers the share their creations via the PSN and host virtual runway shows.The first collaboration was announced at Pitti Uomo, the annual menswear trade show held in Florence, with PUMA by Mihara Yasuhiro. The designer thinks dress "fits the innovative PUMA by Mihara Yasuhiro philosophy." Yasuhiro's inspiration for this season? "Global warming and the dramatic effect it is having on our planet." Some of his creations are shown at his website and you can actually buy pieces from the collection at flagship PUMA stores in major cities. What do you guys think? Is there an audience for this? Is this the beginning of "lifestyle gaming", casual gaming's more mature cousin? [Via Maxconsole]
