The Motyxia Shroud

Upon completing the shell for our piece, Keqi, Nishtha and myself have drawn our attention to the manufacture of other components for the wearable, most importantly the wings and the coding for the LEDs which will be inside the shell.

For the wings, it was obvious that as soon as we decided to use paper, we would need to use a design similar to a paper fan. We felt that this was the most logical direction to take the design. Each wing below is formed of 2 pieces of A1 paper that have been attached to each other and then folded like a paper fan. This technique worked really well and when we tested it on Keqi (who will be our model) we were really pleased with the outcome.

The coding for our product is pretty complex. We wanted to have a pulse or wave of light travel up and down the LED strips leaving a trail of light behind, and we managed to do this using photons.

However, this stage was not without its complications. We wanted the piece to be as bright as possible, however the LEDs began to fail at higher brightnesses as they were drawing too much power for any of our power supplies to handle. We managed to solve this by lowering the brightness once we had used a voltmeter to figure out the problem.

The LED strips were then soldered to our playground express board and stuck to the inside of the origami shell. The end result is a mesmerising and, at times, intimidating form that really captures the aesthetic that we had in mind. We call this piece "The Motyxia Shroud" named after the millipede species that the project was initially inspired by.