Life Dress Presentation

Elizabeth Fuller is a university student at New York University, who is exploring wearable technology, web development and user interface. During her final year, she developed a project called the Life Dress, which is a dress that has LED lights which run on the Game of Life algorithm by created by a mathematician called John Conway.

I have chosen to present her Life Dress project to the class because I thought it looked really interesting and I really liked the design. It was recently presented at the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) Show in New York, in December 2009, where it received lots of positive reviews.

This dress consists of 3 inch tiles, each made of dragon skin silicon and are sewn together in a grid like formation. Embedded within each tile is an LED light, which glows through the translucent material. The form and light patterns of the dress was inspired by John Conway’s Game of Life algorithm, which determines whether each panel is either alive, which indicates the LEDs to turn on, or dead, indicating for the LEDs to turn off. If the cells in the game are all alone or if there are too many clumped together, they would die. Fuller relates this idea to people and how they should find the right level of interaction between the people in their lives in order to live a good life, thus calling her project the Life Dress. The constant changing of the light patterns also relates to our lives in the sense that our lives are also constantly changing and unpredictable. The Life Dress is a representation of our lives.

Fuller uses these simple rules to create an interesting and dynamic light show on the dress, which is a remapping of the 2D grid from the algorithm. The light of the LEDs is diffused by the tiles of dragon skin that the LEDs are embedded in, creating an aesthetically pleasing look. However, the dress is also slightly transparent due to the materials that she has used, which means that it has the potential for indecent exposure if one were to wear it with nothing underneath.

Although the use of silicon tiles might limit the wearability of this dress, her idea is a great concept, which could be further developed to create a garment with more conventional materials. This dress is still a prototype, and Fuller is currently working on creating a 2.0 version.

For more information on the process of this project, go to Elizabeth Fuller's blog here.