Wearable Technology for Performance Dance Project Progress

10/1/2017

Costumes Sketches

These are the costume sketches. AS you might notice, there are some fairly significant changes in certain outfits between what I sketched and what I will be creating as of this moment. There are also a few costumes missing; mainly the Blues and Hip Hop dancers. For these costumes, I already had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted them to look like, and functionality wasn't as much of a problem as it was for dancers. For example, with the aerialist, I had to think of both how to expose the areas in contact with the trapeze most (so no electronics are there), while also making the costume work for more hip focused styles.

Costume Visualizations

These are the costumes from the sketches above. Each design choice has an explanation in the chart below. The yellow dots are LEDs. (;

Story Planning / Explanations

Physical World Progress

So far, I have done a lot of ordering of stuff. I also made a skirt! I wanted to test a new technique, specifically for the swing dancer costume, but also for future pieces, of creating mesh piping to sew around hems that encase neopixels. Since this is a costume rather than an everyday garment, the LEDs don't need to be quite as obtrusively hidden. In the mesh, they are partially, but not entirely hidden from view.

THe other part about the real world progress is that I am trying not to sew as many of the garments by hand this time. Some costumes will be mostly hand sewn, but I am trying to find better ways to incorporate electronics into ready-made clothes.

Coding progress

This code is supposed to use two Microbits, communicating with radio singles, light neopixels based on their proximity. Right now, this is technically working but will require more fiddling before it is exactly what I want it to be. The signal readings that the brightness respond to are a little in consistent, and I am trying to make the whole thing more smooth.

For this one, at this point, this is just test code. I was tiring to get the compass to work, and it doesn't work all that well, to fill bars on the MicroBit based on where you are facing when turning in a circle. It didn't work, but after more fiddling, we learned that it is because the Microbit's compass readings are about 30 degrees off in random directions for no apparent reason. We (Kari and I) used an iPhone compass pointing in the same direction as the Microbit, and the Microbit was consistently off.

Stay updated!

On my personal blog, I post weekly updating my progress, click here for the link.

Author

Emily Daub wrote this article. Emily Daub is an undergraduate research assistant in the LPC. She also received an Undergraduate Research Opportunity grant from the University of Colorado at Boulder and is mentored by Ben Shapiro.