Dare to wear

What if wearing a cocktail dress really meant having cocktails on tap? The DareDroid does this, but only after you agree to play with it.

Interdisciplinary collaborations very often have uniquely innovative results. Just look at what happened when a fashion designer, a hacker and a sculptor joined creative forces – they developed a “biomechanic hybrid cocktail robot”. Which is a rather complex way of introducing a robot that dispenses actual cocktails to the wearer.

But there’s a catch. The robot's sensors need to be sufficiently charmed before dishing out the drinks. Oh, and you have to engage in a game of truth and dare before any of this can happen.

Still sounding complicated? So basically Dutch fashion designer Anouk Wipprecht got together with hacker Marius Kintel and sculptor Jane Tingley, collectively known as The Modern Nomads (MoNo), to create the DareDroid cocktail dress.

The wearer of the dress is challenged to a game of truth and dare. Once the challenge is accepted and completed, the DareDroid dispenses liquid to the wearer by combining assorted medical valves, sensors and open source hardware. Wipprecht explains: “Your presence triggers the dress to produce milk, and your willingness to play a game of truth and dare combined with your natural charms, triggers the decision to give you more than just tepid milk.” The game is played on a touch-screen. The rest goes like this: “LED’s on the robotic dress indicates your proximity to the human host, and if you breach her intimate space the LED’s turn red and the system shuts down. Play the game, and be rewarded.”

DareDroid works to explore human interaction in public spaces and “inverts the normal social experience by asking people to reveal personal information”.

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