Google software engineer Christina Ernst, who is also the founder of ‘She Builds Robots’, has amazed the online community with the introduction of the world's first AI dress, known as the Medusa dress.
This extraordinary black garment is adorned with golden robotic snakes throughout. Ernst detailed the development process and showcased its progression from initial failed concepts. The dress is adorned with three smaller snakes around the waist and a larger one around the neck, all synchronized with AI technology.
In a video, she demonstrated how AI utilizes facial tracking to control the movement of the snake's head in real-time. This unique fusion has captured the attention of the online world, drawing significant interest from both technology and fashion enthusiasts.
Ernst shared that she devised a robotic snake dress and has completed its construction. She programmed an optional mode that utilizes artificial intelligence for identifying faces and guiding the snake head towards the person looking at you.
She jokingly referred to it as the world's first AI dress, likening it to a fashionable surveillance state. To minimize the number of motors needed to be soldered and maintain the dress's lightness, she drew inspiration from automata toys. To create the snake bodies, she learned to produce TinkerCAD models, then utilized 3D printing, spray painting, and added a rotating motor.
She validated the functionality of his design on a moving body with the aid of cardboard prototypes.
“I polished up the code, finished designing motor mounts that could be sewn to fabric and move with my body and then, of course, designed and sewed the actual dress, which was just as much math as the engineering. All the wiring and microcontroller brain went in a zippered pocket in the back. There’s a lot I would improve about this dress but thank you for all your support on this fun project,” Christina Ernst added.
Sharing the video, the engineer wrote, “My robotic Medusa dress is finally done.”