Lightsuit

Wearable LED fashion, hand-built for Burning Man 2011 — 300 addressable lights, an Arduino, and a lot of sewing.

MAKERLAB Project #8 — wearable fashion prototypes, Burning Man 2011.

Light as fashion

People have started to wear lights as a form of fashion. Like most fashion it is used to accentuate parts of the body. This essay discusses the work that we did building a light suit and wearing it to Burning Man 2011, the reactions we got, the technical challenges and some of our observations on the topic.

Any circa 2011 lightsuit is by necessity a crude approximation of future fashion. By 2012 this kind of technology will be common. By 2020 there will no longer be any novelty to embedded lights in one's attire.

A light suit is in a sense a vulgarity — like smearing makeup all over your body as a means to gauge the cultural response to adornment. It explores fashion in the same crude way that the Large Hadron Collider explores the sub-atomic universe; by the brute force smashing of things together and seeing what spins out.

There is a Donna Haraway moment in this as well. Why wrap myself up in lights? What is it about some new technological artifact that makes me (and others) want to roll in it? The suit is a text — the lights sequence patterns and communicate. There are statements made both explicit and implicit, about identity, how I define and see myself, how others respond; how ego and simian preening are folded together by a new technical fetish.

Critical fashion?

There is a deep seated, somewhat unconscious appeal to covering oneself with lights — it's as if the body is a text and one is forming a critical interpretation of it. It says a lot about identity, pride, self. It speaks to our simian nature and ego. It's almost a hopelessly naive conflation of technology with self — a cargo-culting of technology — as if one is somehow faster, better, more desirable because of a techno-fetishistic sheathing.

Even the quantity and placement of lights is in question; should one emphasize the gross musculature — calves, biceps, chest? Should the lighting reflect a gender-neutral body or should it be masculine or feminine? In the truest sense it is bling; if lights are a currency of the Burning Man culture then more lights is more wealth.

Human anatomy

It turns out that placing lights closely on the body is an intersection of studies in anatomy with the limits of the lights' wiring hardware and the complexity of mapping the lights to software. Paige acted as a model for the suit, rigged in a black unitard with white circles marking light placements.

In defining exactly where the lights were going to be placed, many issues arose with respect to lighting budgets, distribution, and physical comfort. We had to develop an improved vocabulary of the human body in order to communicate which parts we were referring to (the arm? the upper arm? the upper arm front or back?). We also had hardware limits such as cable-strand lengths, so the ultimate placement was a compromise between physical limits and design aspirations.

Lighting budgets

I worked out an initial plan with very specific placements — roughly 250 lights per side, split evenly over the limbs, arranged to emphasize frame and muscle, leaving the spine free to lean, the bum free to sit, inner legs free to walk. Ultimately I had to simplify and group limbs into blocks of 50 (since the lights came in groups of 50).

History

How this came about was a series of happy accidents. In late July, Mike Winter and Will Wright from Stupid Fun Club dropped by our offices at PARC to see what we were doing with Augmented Reality. Mike extended an invitation to visit their lab, and there I heard they were doing a lighting project for Burning Man — the Serpent Twins. I dropped by the Cool Neon office in early August and saw their brand new product, "Total Control Lighting."

Learning just enough about the Arduino, I got started that very first evening. Doing a suit seemed like the obvious simple thing to do. From there it was working through software, budget, hardware and power-management issues. I went through two entire suit revisions, but it was manageable. The biggest risk and most time-consuming portion was simply physical light placement and attachment — more so than software or power.

Suit hardware and power

I started with an Arduino Duemilanove, then switched to a Seeeduino for performance. Six light strands of 50 lights each, with each strand wanting ~1.0 amp at 5V — six amps total. To power the lights directly I tapped the red (+5V) and blue (ground) cables, keeping a common ground between the Arduino and the strands. The Arduino's severe RAM limits capped me at ~300 lights and forced me to precompute a static 2D color-mapping table rather than drawing strands to memory at runtime.

Simplified effects sequencing

The source is on GitHub. I treated the skin as a 2D bitmap and built an adjacency graph of the light positions. One effects loop visits every pixel once and each effect can act on that pixel — the inverse of the normal reasoning, but fastest for global effects. Every effect was an independent, procedurally-generated animation composited onto the suit; no movies, no shared state.

Reactions

The suit got very powerful reactions from almost every person. The simplest, brightest effects worked best — a rolling blue "lighthouse" and a vertical red "falling" pattern. People often ran across the desert to intercept me. Younger, tech-savvy folks would knowingly shout "Arduino?" It was a raver trap: sometimes I'd be mobbed by twenty or thirty people wanting a hug at once, which became a little scary. There was an instant-rock-star effect that could be turned off at any moment by simply turning off the lights.

People were most excited by motion. If I ran or danced I'd get a chorus of ooohs and aaahs from across the Playa and from art-cars full of dancers. Joining a group that was dancing was warm and welcoming — as if Burning Man itself had been personified and had joined in. Superficially it was good clean fun, and while wearing it I felt like I was contributing to Burning Man, not just consuming — even if it was also heavy, tiring, and in a sense a job.

Contributors

Mike Winter of Stupid Fun Club and Benjamin James of Cool Neon provided inspiration, motivation, and key technical support. Jennifer Hernandez of the Fandango Camp sewed the lights to the suit — days of back-breaking work, nearly 24 hours straight on the last day. Paige Saez was the model and co-designer; Paige and I ran Makerlab, a design-and-fabrication incubator for projects like this. Many others helped with time, materials, and ideas, and my employer PARC was gracious in supporting the time off.