DAY FOR NIGHT SOLAR POWER DRESS!
by Abigail Doan, 05/01/08
We love our green fashion here at Inhabitat, but ‘green gadget couture’ is something for us to really get charged up about! This white (hot) tiled frock (think Paco Rabanne circa mid-1960’s) is the quintessential Day-For-Night eco-fashion number, as it passively soaks up the sun’s rays during the daytime so that you can be a flashy fashion power pack at night. Showcased at Siggraph some time ago, we thought that we would resuscitate this eco-chic modular dress for another groovy go around on the sustainable style circuit.
The Day-For-Night Solar Dress, designed by Despina Papadopoulos at Studio 5050, is custom-tailored with 448 white circuit board tiles that ‘accommodate solar cells, RGB LEDs, or photocells and jumper connections in the form of 0 Ohm resistors’. The black tiles are solar cells that are used to charge batteries to power the device. Metal rings hold the tiles together creating a sexy chain mail effect that one can hardly ‘resist’ in wearable technology. Power is transmitted via a control board that communicates with the tiles and also links to a computer via radio frequency (RF). A bit tedious perhaps for the average user, but we think that the Day-For-Night Dress is an energy-generating stunner, and obviously a total conversation piece and innovative shift. The length of the dress obviously determines its power-packin’ punch, but with hemlines always fluctuating, we say interact at your own risk!
[...] the table shell and legs and tempered glass for the table top. The tempered glass panels sandwich silicon-based solar cells that turn the sun’s energy into 73 kilowatt hours of green power per year. It comes a variety [...]