Melbourne: A dress with animated flowers on its neckline, shirt sleeves that make sounds in tune with your body language and a hemline with a mind of its own have been developed by a Canadian researcher.
Professor Joanna Berzowska and International colleagues will discuss these and other examples of 'wearable technology' at a workshop in Australia next year called reSkin.
Berzowska's flowery dress, named Kukkia, has a neckline with felt and silk flowers that open and close according to a special electronics embedded in the dress.
"I really wanted to make these dresses that have personalities, that move and behave almost like animals," Berzowska, who teaches computation art at Concordia University in Montreal, was quoted by ABC online, as saying.
The flower petals are made of silk and felt, and contain thin wires of Nitinol, an alloy of nickel and titanium.
Nitinol is a 'shape memory alloy', which can be programmed to have different shapes at different temperatures.
When the wire heats it shrinks and pulls the petals together, closing the flower. As it cools down, the wire relaxes and the petals open.
The system is run on rechargeable lithium polymer batteries, originally designed for use in model aeroplanes, which are embedded in pouches in the dress.
Another dress with a mind of its own is Vilkas, which has a hemline that goes up and down on its own.
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