Concept
The basic concept of our final project is partially inherited from negative dark design, which could challenge what people take for granted and make them uncomfortable. Ken and I were interested in cloth design that prevents people from communicating with each other and expressing themselves freely.
At first, we decided to make clothing with lots of arms on it. Yet we found it was too challenging to accomplish.
Luckily, we were inspired by the Burr Puzzle or “鲁班锁”, a complicated Chinese traditional lock made with vertical and horizontal wood pieces.
Sketch
In case we wanted to lock people up using straight blocks like burr puzzles, we designed our first sketch as a cross.
The succinct straight-line design seemed pretty attractive to us, as elegance thrives with simplicity. As shown in the picture above, there were five movable wood pieces that could conceal or reveal the person’s face. Parts of the human’s face were exposed to the outside, while the majority of the face was hidden behind. When the person wants to reach out to the outside world, wood pieces would move and conceal the whole face to isolate the person.
Progress
We first built the clothing on the Rhino and attached it to a body mesh.
Transforming the file among Rhino, Mixamo, Blender, and Lens Studio was an important step, which also easily led to problems. Not only could the size of the file vary among these platforms, but there could also be compatibility problems.
After importing this suit into the Lens Studio, we found that one of the potential problems could be, as shown below, that our clothing is intended to restrict the body movement while the user on the Snapchat doesn’t have that limitation.
Although wood was our first and original choice for this piece of clothing, we tried different materials on Lens Studio, where we found the material “Bubble” was pretty elegant and suitable for this suit.
Future Improvement
- Due to the time limitation, we did not accomplish the interactive part, those movable wood pieces, which became parts of decoration in this project. A little bit of animation and a sensor-trigger system could achieve this interaction perfectly.
- Solve the problem of the user breaking through the model, as this dress forces or requires people to wear it in a specific gesture.