Video lab coat turns geek to chic

Sandrine Ceurstemont, video producer

The "geek-in-a-lab-coat" look is now in, if you happen to be sporting this groovy video coat displaying an episode of The Simpsons (see video above). Inventor David Forbes, who runs a company called Cathode Corner, was inspired to build the garment while queuing for tickets to the Burning Man festival earlier this year. "I had seen how effective an LED coat could be the year before, with a fellow wearing a metal suit covered with blinking LEDs," he says. "Why not build a coat covered in a video screen? No one had done that before."

Building a colour TV from scratch isn't an easy task but Forbes' experience working on radio telescopes at the University of Arizona was useful. "I use programmable gate arrays in my day job," he says.

He fashioned the coat from flexible boards lined with colour LEDs. Video can be fed into a controller circuit by hooking up a video iPod or other video source, so that the signal gets digitised and split into its red, green and blue components. They're distributed through cables to four quadrant controllers that store the data and can be used to manipulate the LED display.

This weekend, Forbes will showing off the garment at the Maker Faire in Detroit. "I plan to connect a video camera to it so people can see themselves on me," he says. Although some have proposed turning the coat into a cloaking device, it would be tricky to create since the screen would have to account for different points of view to display what's behind the wearer. The system may however be of interest to advertisers looking for high-tech sandwich boards.

If you enjoyed this video, check out a new material that can be used to create spray-on clothing.

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/17043aa7/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Cnstv0C20A110C0A70Cvideo0Elab0Ecoat0Eturns0Egeek0Eto0Echic0Bhtml0DDCMP0FOTC0Erss0Gnsref0Fonline0Enews/story01.htm

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