Women who find their personal space constantly invaded by unwanted visitors would do well to slip into this nifty little number: the robotic spider dress.
Created by high-tech fashion designer Anouk Wipprecht, the creepy-looking garment begins twitching its six robotic ‘legs’ when someone comes too close.
Her unique dress made its first appearance last November at Cafe Neu Romance, an international robot performance festival in Prague. It’s not known how many people fled in terror when it was unveiled.
To build the arachnid-inspired outfit, the Netherlands-based designer joined forces with Austrian software engineer and hacker Daniel Schatzmayr. The pair fitted the wearable contraption with sensors to help it interact with its surroundings and scare the bejesus out of anyone not expecting it to start jerking about when they got too close.
Wipprecht, described on her website as “a rising star in the emerging field of ‘fashionable technology’”, specializes in “systems around the body that tend towards artificial intelligence.”
She says her prototype mechanical dress “aims to give more power and ‘psychological thrills’ to the sugar-sweet character that performative wearables often have.” We think she succeeded there.
Other work by Wipprecht includes a dress which enables the wearer to disappear in a puff of smoke and another made with a material that can change from black to transparent.
In a recent interview with Fashioning Tech, Wipprecht said she got involved in high-tech fashion after becoming bored with regular fashion design.
You can check out the spider dress in the video below. Arachnophobes, on the other hand, should return to Digital Trends’ homepage forthwith.
[via Mashable]
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