Klight – an sparkling, interactive dress

Avantex-Innovation-Award 2009 winner in the category ‘New Fashion’ was ‘Klight‘, a sparkling interactive dress was the highlight during my walk around the TechTextil.

Klight is an interactive dress which translates the body’s movement into light, connecting the body with its surroundings.

To achieve the effect, a new stretchable circuit board technology, developed by Fraunhofer IZM, was integrated into the dress.

The result is a unique symbiosis of fashion and technology which combines ease and dynamism.

The dress features integrated diodes, an accelerometer and a microcontroller, which detect the wearer’s movements and convert the dynamics into an LED-display pattern.

The integrated LED display is made possible by the stretchable substrate.

The manufacturing process for these stretchable circuit boards (SCB) was developed by scientists at Fraunhofer IZM and TU Berlin as part of the European research project STELLA (STretchable ELectronics for Large Area Applications).

To achieve the required flexibility needed while integrating electronics into textiles the highly conductive but basically rigid copper wires are structured into the substrate in tiny meander patterns.

Depending on the design of the meander shapes the researchers are able to achieve elasticities of up to 300 percent.

Klight has been designed and developed by Mareike Michel, fashion design student at the University of Applied Science in Berlin, Germany in cooperation with scientists at Fraunhofer IZM and TU Berlin, Christian Dils, Rene Vieroth and Manuel Seckel.

For more information about Klight please visit the IZM Website.