GadgetHer

3D Printed Dress Gets Clearer the More Personal Data You Share Online

On the Internet, the more personal info we share with others, the more naked we appear in front of them. That’s exactly the message that this 3D printed dress wants to convey.

x.pose, the creation of designers Xuedi Chen and Pedro G. C. Oliveira, is more than just a simple dress. This 3D printed sculpture relies on sharing data online to portray one of the cruelest realities of modern times. The concept behind it is quite simple: the more personal info is shared on the Internet by the wearer, the greater the surface of skin exposed.

The “20 hand-cut reactive displays” that make up the personalized mesh of the sculpture receive via Bluetooth Chen’s geolocation data, with the help of a mobile app.

Some of the displays correspond to the neighborhood that the designer is in, and when such data is collected, they start pulsating. At this point, the displays are toggled between the transparent and the opaque state, but the more info is collected, the more displays become clear.

Over the years, we have added so much data about ourselves that we lost control over what other people know about us and what they don’t. If given the possibility to gather on a single page everything that we’ve shared online, I bet that most of us would be horrified at the incredible amount of personal info that’s out there into the wild.

The x.pose 3D printed data-driven sculpture means to emphasize that while still maintaining decency. In this context, you should know that at no time is the skin of the wearer exposing more than it is necessary for delivering the message.

It would be interesting if this data-driven piece of clothing that was designed for the ITP Thesis 2014 at NYU gave birth to a trend. People would start the day in opaque clothes, and as time goes by, their pieces of clothing would become more and more transparent.

Let’s go even further and imagine a concept of a data-driven piece of clothing that becomes transparent the more lies someone says or the meaner they are to other people. If that wouldn’t convince everyone to behave properly, I don’t know what could. Either way, the x.pose dress is definitely something innovative with plenty of future applications.

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