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July 22 2010
Online Shoppers Can Play Dress-Up With a Robotic Torso
Add one more job to the list–along with vacuuming floors and assisting in surgeries, now robots can try on clothes for you. The company Fits.me is developing a robotic torso for online shoppers that can morph to match shoppers’ body dimensions, creating virtual fitting rooms on clothing websites.
Men can try a demo version of the product on the company’s site. After entering measurements such as neck and waste size, and selecting from three torso types, the site displays what you might look like in a particular shirt. The torso doesn’t morph in real time; instead, the site pulls from a database of pictures–2,000 body size combinations, the company reports, systematically showing users if pinstripes in small, medium, or large will make them look fat. Shirt sellers Hawes and Curtis is already testing a version of the system on their site.
As reported by the BBC, the company next hopes to develop a version of the torso for women. Maarja Kruusma a professor of biorobotics at the University of Tallinn who helped the company develop the system, told the BBC that it’s a difficult task. Women’s clothing comes in more intricate styles, and their torsos are more complicated to model, she says:
“You can’t just take a male mannequin and put breasts on it. That doesn’t work.”
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July 13 2010
How to Make High Fashion From Bacterial Slime
It’s not Prada, Gucci, or Dolce & Gabbana. That head-turning jacket is a bacteria cellulose original. Bio-Couture clothing transforms a hardening ooze–yanked from tubs of yeast, bacteria, and green tea–into high fashion.
It may sound a bit like a Project Runway challenge, but according to the Bio-Couture website, the microbe-made clothes are meant as a sustainability project. The bacteria forms a congealing fiber (video), which designers can roll into thin sheets to make the base of each garment. As reported by ecouterre, where we found this story, overlaying pieces of the sheets as they dry will “felt” them together into a fashionable whole, without the need for stitching. Examples of the Bio-Couture’s latest pieces are currently on display as part of a nine-month exhibit called “TrashFashion” at London’s Science Museum.
Suzanne Lee and her design team at the School of Fashion & Textiles at Central Saint Martins in London hope to make even more complicated pieces using this technique–as perhaps evidenced by pictures on the project’s website of mannequins submerged in bacterial slime.
“Our ultimate goal is to literally grow a dress in a vat of liquid…”
Fancy color accoutrements come from dyes made of foodstuffs like port wine, curry powder, cherries, and beetroot. And the whole garment is compostable once passé–eliminating any evidence of past fashion faux pas.
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Image: Bio-Couture
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