Cyber Fiber

I saw some wearable fiber optic clothing from Lumigram using a material called luminex. This basically has very thin side glow fiber optic cables weaved into a fabric that can be sewn into clothing. Sounds cool, but as it would turn out this material is prohibitively expensive and at about $15 a square foot you can imagine buying enough to make any actual clothing out of it is a bit over the top, though small sections are doable, besides in some things less is more.

I have ordered up some of this material, but I am still searching for the right donor clothing to use as a base to add on to. Also I am still a little worried about screwing up the material in some blundering and expensive mistake. So in the mean time I have been playing around with some much less expensive per foot side glow twinkle fiber obtics.

I found a 42 strand cable of the stuff and got 10 feet of that to work with. Right now mine dosn’t light up nearly as brightly as the picture, but I am just using idividual LED’s and still working out which type of will give me the best look. I don’t want over powering light, but a good subtle glow across the cable with the highlights from the compressions giving the twinkle effect looks pretty cool to me.

Initially I had a hard time getting the cable to light up at all with some 10,000 mcd and 7,000 mcd red and blue LED’s. Not very bright in the grand scheme of things even though they are claimed as “Super bright” apparently our definition of super is a little different.

With this stuff there is definitely brightness in numbers, but I’m only using a couple strands at a time so the side glow effect was a bit dimisnished. I started by scoring the fibers on some short sections to allow the light to escape the sides better which deifnitely helped for shorter lengths, unfortunately it ruined the light for longer lengths of fiber.

I am just about finished with a belt that I started as a test for what this will look like and I was able to add a few extra scores to the fiber to add to the light emitted. Overall I think it turned out pretty well for a first test item. This used 5 strands around the belt and I did a test with a red and a blue LED. The red seems a little under exposed in the pictures, could just be me jiggling the camera. I was actually surprised at how bright the blue was even though it is a lower power LED.

Over all I am aiming for a mix of this into some more circuit based patterns with only small strips or a few strands on any piece of clothing. I am trying to find a good high broad shouldered vest, but I am running out of hope of finding something that I will like. I am still trying to work out what this might really look like inserted into hair. I’ve been slow at getting around to that part yet.