A P P A R E L v1.0 — Fashioned Out of Digital Fabric

Apparel v1.0 is an experimental prototype of future AR fashion
Date
4 Feb 2016
See Also
A P P A R E L v0.9a
Documentation

Aug­ment­ed real­i­ty is many things, but if you look at it more as part of an age-old dis­course on how to man­i­fest 3D graph­ics in space, then it's the same as holo­grams or even mag­ic, for the more agnos­tic. One par­tic­u­lar­ly chal­leng­ing aspect of AR for design­ers is that it con­sti­tutes a bla­tant assault on the sacro­sanct idea that form must fol­low func­tion. Because that's not the case any­more. So, what to do?

Well, if you use AR to move at least part of the shape of some­thing onto a dig­i­tal, real-time, tracked lay­er, you make it become entire­ly dynam­ic. Clas­sic exam­ple: a t‑shirt. Put a mark­er on it, point your phone's cam­era at the mark­er and bam! There's a zom­bie drag­on fly­ing in cir­cles around the t‑shirt, and you've made the "signs" of that t‑shirt a dig­i­tal rep­re­sen­ta­tion. Now onto a Lvl-10 take on this: you're no longer show­cas­ing some­thing tacky like a drag­on, but decide that this t‑shirt will show up as a mas­sive dig­i­tal fur-coat, or some­thing that inflates and deflates… Accord­ing to the time of day, or how close oth­er peo­ple are to the t‑shirt. That's where AR becomes an inter­est­ing ter­rain for design­ers and, in a gist, where A P P A R E L starts as a project.

Think of the pos­si­bil­i­ty of an ever-updat­a­ble appear­ance that doesn’t require the buy­ing of more out­fits. Think about wear­ing your online pro­file, sta­tus or avatar. Some­thing live, that changes along with you as if you were wear­ing your own infographic.

A P P A R E L v1.0 is a func­tion­al pro­to­type con­sist­ing of a min­i­mal neo­prene gar­ment — meant only to cov­er one's body, and opti­mized for cam­era track­ing — and an AR app that con­nects to social media and lets the view­er seed their data into the dig­i­tal lay­er of the piece. 

See fic­tion­al documentary
"Nor­mal, Like Source Code Chic"
Read the short story
Lis­ten to the sound­track of the project
Back­ground and tech­ni­cal­i­ties of the project

Appar­el v1.0 is an exper­i­men­tal pro­to­type for AR fash­ion based on the N O R M A L S uni­verse. it was made with the sup­port of The Nation­al Cen­ter of Cin­e­matog­ra­phy (DICRéAM) in France. Soft­ware devel­op­ment was lead by V3ga who built the appli­ca­tion in Openframeworks.

Big thanks to:

Remy Baudequin …………………………………… photography
Marjorie Aguilar ……………………………… as 3PLUS3MAKE5
Maxime Vautier …………………………………… as ABDLCROCO
Louise Yu ………………………………………………… couture
Marjolaine Vialle …………………………… make-up and hair
Damien Sujkowski ……………………………… all-round sidekick