Fashion is the most rapidly changing industry. With fashion studios and designers joining hands with technology makers to produce cult cognitive dresses, futurists like Michael Bruce Sterling don’t need to struggle in making people understand what cyberpunk is.
If you have been wondering how the application of the Internet of Things can transform the fashion industry, the 2016 Met Gala fashion event is a live example, where model Karolina Kurkova donned a dress that was half man-, half machine-made. It was a white tulle design embroidered with 150 LED-connected flowers.
The awe-inspiring fact about the dress is that the colors/hues of the flowers change as per the tone of tweets tagged with #MetGala and #CognitiveDress. British design studio Marchesa made it happen by harnessing the capability of
IBM Watson Internet of Things platform. The dress has been made to sense five key emotions - joy, patience, excitement, encouragement, and curiosity of the public. The dress responds to the emotions in ways that were only depicted in Sci-Fi movies. If tweets express a high joy value, for example, the dress would light up with a bright rose color.
Let’s see the role of the Internet of Things applications in the making of this hi-tech dress.The color sense of the dress, and hence, that of the LED lights is guided by IBM’s Cognitive Color Tool, a program that uses color psychology to match emotion to hues. For this, IBM Watson is fed with datasets comprising of a collection of runway dress images from various designers and a collection of images of Marchesa dresses.
How does IBM Watson compute the relevancy of the color to the psychological traits? Well, the IoT platform leverages the advanced machine learning and information retrieval technologies to successfully churn and interpret this colossal amount of data to come with meaningful results.
What are the takeaways for fashion designers? How can they use the Internet of Things to sound unique from the crowd and appeal to their audiences or customer? They can leverage the Internet of Things applications to understand the interests and perception of the customers and come with more relevant fashion styles. They can predict fashion trends and gain an edge on the competition. From where to collect the data? Well, there are many avenues - from fashion events to their brick-and-mortar stores.
How does the flower sense the emotion? The LED lights attached to the dress’ embroidered flowers are connected to Watson’s Tone Analyzer API, which can interpret the emotional content of tweets. So, here is one more thing that the constituents of the retail industry can learn. They can utilize social data more effectively - faster and more meaningful interpretation can be made to drive innovation in fashion. The Tone Analyzer can read data from all leading social platforms including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Pinterest. It can unveil emotions hidden in the communication style
The Bottom LineSo data can also be fashionable. However, to make the most out of it, your
IoT development strategy must stay in tune with the consumer’s media usage behavior and pattern. Moreover, the IoT application must be backed by a robust IoT platform equipped with natural language processing, information retrieval, knowledge representation, automated reasoning, and machine learning.