3D printing helps create this headdress that responds to brain activity! 🙂
http://www.inside3dp.com/3d-printed-headdress-shows-brain-a…
3D printed headdress shows your brain activity
It looks like you’ve come straight out of the shower and have forgotten to rinse your head after shampooing, but it’s far more fascinating than that. A fashion designer has created a 3D printed headdress that indicates what parts of your brain are working, by flashing different colors and sectors.
NEUROTiQ is the brainchild of fashion designer Kristin Neidlinger, the founder of SENSOREE, who used 3D printing with EEG brain sensors to create this unusual head attire.
A 3D printed brain animating accessory
Neidlinger calls NEUROTiQ a ‘brain animating fashion item’, as it maps your thoughts and then translates them into different colors. For instance, red indicates deep sleep, orange shows a meditative state, and consciousness is yellow-green. A combined color display of blue, purple and red displays indicate multi-sensory gamma brain activity.
SENSOREE specialize in creating wearable technology with a difference. Their designs often include bio.media, which reveals something about the wearer that they themselves might not be aware of communicating.
Futuristic materials
To create these designs, Neidlinger chose futuristic materials and typically embeds them with bio sensory technology. This not only provides an emotionally based creation controlled by our bodies, but allows others to be aware of our most intimate feelings.
“I love materials,” Neidlinger told 3DPrint.com, “I am a tactile enthusiast and have always loved the qualities of textures and structures of shape. The NeurotiQ was my first work with 3D printing. It was a grand experiment with materials. Currently, 3D prints are solid objects and it is challenging to find comfort and movement on the body. The fashions are more like armor.”
Mapping the inner workings of the human brain
The headdress itself has been 3D printed as a knitted design, which could been seen as representing the complicated pattern of neurons and synapses within our own brain structure. Embedded within the 3D knit are small light points that respond to Emotiv Epoc EEG brain sensors called neuron globules.
There are 14 of these LED 3D printed globules, which once embedded into the nylon ‘wool’, then had to be hand knitted into the headdress. This, as you can imagine, was not simple task, and took 102 hours to complete.
“To make the forms flexible, I thought to combine traditional hand craft of knitting with the new technology of 3D printing,” said Neidlinger. “3D printing offers sculptural detail that is so fantastically intricate. I love the fact that you can dream up any design and make it tangible. The possibilities seem so vast – from designing jewelry to automated space stations, so why not space station jewelry? I am especially fond of working with Formlab’s Form 1 3D printer. The resolution is so fine and the resin has a nice capture of light. So far we are delighted and cannot wait to see what will happen on the runway!”
3D printed fashion fads?
MACHINIC, a San Francisco based digital prototyping and consulting company, helped Neidlinger with her NEUROTiQ headdress. Her colleagues at SENSOREE Grant Patterson and Nathan Tucker also lent a hand.
The headdress made its debut at New York Fashion Week, where it was accompanied by other 3D printed designs, including several 3D printed dresses.
As for wearable technology, it appears that we are now becoming obsessed with creating items of clothing that reveal more than we could possibly say on any social media site. But when will it be enough, and is anyone apart from ourselves actually that interested?
inside3dp.com
by Janey Davies | Sep 26 2014 , 09:00:50
Malta 3D Printing 