Visions of Couture : Designing an Interactive System for Fashion

Abstract: Visions of Couture is a project that explores the relationship between high fashion and technology. The aim of this work was to incorporate interactivity in a context, namely fashion, that has always been a pioneer in research and innovation but where interactive artefacts have so far had quite a marginal role. After collecting insights through literature review and interviews, the project focused on creating a system for fashion showrooms that would permit users and clients to interact with holographic projections of the models through gestures. This system allows for a slower and more attentive interaction, in contrast with the frenzy of the fashion show, letting the users linger on the looks they are interested in and possibly overcoming the space and time limitations that fashion showrooms usually have. The result of this project is a system composed of a holographic projection mesh and a wearable bracelet to recognise gestures. The bracelet contains an Arduino Nano 33 BLE that has been trained through Machine Learning to recognise the selected gestures and communicates with Processing to play the right videos. The project suggests a way to use holography as a mean for a shared and embodied mixed reality experience and a path for designing comfortable gesture interactions that are intuitive and coherent with the context. Crucial to this project were the concepts of embodiment, corporality, shared mixed reality and intuitive gestures.