Digital Viral fashion

HMMM... very cool in theory? great digital media project. No more laundry maybe. Read on... According to MIT researchers, fashion in the physical world is moving at a much slower pace than online. "[In the online world,] fashion has been moving faster and faster as communication systems become faster and faster," said Judith Donath, director of the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Lab, who is conducting this research with student Christine M. Liu.

Urbanhermes defines a communicative fashion framework that would ultimately consist of OLED-integrated clothing material that could display digital images and designs, updating whenever the user desired. For instance, a T-shirt could be solid blue one day and striped the next, she said.

These digital images could then be transmitted wirelessly to clothing worn by other people, thereby creating a sort of viral fashion, propagating in much the same way a virus does online. Each piece of clothing, in this example, would also have user-set permissions that could allow/disallow this propagation, or enforce a degradation of images upon transmission, ensuring that the original artwork is always the best quality.

The key to Urbanhermes, Donath explained, is to bring this propagation speed to the physical world so that changing the pattern displayed on your shirt or pants would be as simple as absorbing fashion from the person next to you, or even subscribing to a feed from a designer.

"In the physical world, fashion is not limited by the communication rate [like an RSS feed] but by material," Donath said. "People can't discard their clothing on a daily basis."

The proof-of-concept, which Donath admitted is simplistic, consists of a Sharp Zaurus PDA woven into a messenger bag. The LCD screen of the Zaurus, which features a Linux-based development platform, is visible through a clear plastic window. The device uses Bluetooth and infrared technology for proximity detection and data transmission.

While the idea of OLED-integrated clothing is not new -- the military has been researching adaptive camouflage for years -- the MIT approach to fashion and viral propagation is innovative.

Flickr, which is an website dedicated to photo sharing, is an example of electronic fashion, according to Donath. Images on Flickr's photo feeds change on a real time basis, and are propagated via the Internet. One method to display Flickr fashion, for example, would be to stream an RSS feed of community-supplied images from Flickr to a desktop PC to display as a screensaver.

"[With Urbanhermes,] the notion of fast fashion, as we've seen it on blogs and on Flickr, can migrate to the physical world of face-to-face urban integration," Donath said.