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Intel’s Adrenaline Dress Lets You Literally Wear Your Emotions on Your Sleeve

Our clothing can often reflect our mood. When we’re feeling confident, we’ll put some extra effort into our ensembles, trying to look put together for the outside world. When we’re bummed out, we’ll wear sweatpants for seven days straight and a ratty old tank top with a shark on it. (Maybe that’s just me.) When we’re at the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show, we wear a futuristic dress that can not only detect our adrenaline levels, but shift its shape accordingly. And that’s exactly what Intel has done with their conceptual Adrenaline Dress.

Unveiled at CES in Las Vegas, the high fashion garment looks like it would be right at home in the Capitol from The Hunger Games. Except this dress can actually help the wearer manage their stress levels, so perhaps Katniss would have been better off with Intel rather than Cinna’s fiery designs.

Partnering with architect-turned-fashion designer Becca McCharen’s sportswear label Chromat, Intel has created the Expanding Dress. The garment’s very form expands and collapses based on sensory data gathered from the user’s stress and adrenaline levels. The dress is constructed of memory alloy (which “remembers” its original shape, neoprene and corset boning, and 3D-printed nylon. The 3D-printed dress has a sleek back body and skeletal, angular lattice-work on the back that gives the impression of a peacock refracted through the lenses of both Karl Lagerfeld and H.R. Giger.

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So what makes the dress “smart” exactly? How does it manage to detect all these biometric statistics? It is powered by the Intel Curie Module, a small, button-sized computer used in many existing wearable devices. The Curie works in tandem with a variety of sensors that are able to detect changes in the wearer’s biometrics, such as perspiration, respiration, and body heat–all of which indicate adrenal shifts.

Chances are that you’re already quite familiar with a number of Chromat designs; the label furnished Taylor Swift’s futuristic swimwear in her “Bad Blood” video, created Beyonce’s 2013 Super Bowl outfit, and has provided other garments for artists like Nicki Minaj and Madonna, to boot. The idea behind the Expanding Dress is to make clothing responsive to one’s biology and environmental stressors, which should, in turn, make the wearer a little more comfortable in both their own skin and the clothes they wear.

Here’s a video of the dress in action.

Take a look at some more photographs of the dress in our gallery below.

What do you think of this so-called “smart dress?” Would you want clothing that can react based on your mood? What kind of garment should they tackle next? Let us know in the comments below. Then stay tuned to Nerdist.com for an interview with the designer of the dress, as well as our continuing coverage of CES 2016.

Images: Dan Casey

Dan Casey is the senior editor of Nerdist and the author of books about Avengers and Star Wars. You can follow him on Twitter (@Osteoferocious).

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