This Dress Turns Transparent Every Time You Tweet

X.Pose is a piece of wearable tech that does something none of the Fitbits or Google Glasses of the world can: It turns transparent as you produce online data to remind you how vulnerable you are on the internet.

The dress, which is part of Xuedi Chen and Pedro Oliveira’s Interactive Telecommunications thesis at NYU, is made of flexible 3-D printed mesh and a layer of reactive displays. It connects to your smartphone and becomes clear as you produce more and more information in the form of tweets and Facebook posts. The areas which turn transparent correspond with the neighborhood one is in at the time. Right now, it appears that the dress only works in New York so if I put it on in San Francisco (where it is currently very cold), I would only look partly naked, as the dress itself is fairly revealing.

Despite X.Pose’s revealing nature, the creators state that the garment is political, not sexual. It’s a response to how freely we allow our information to flow through internet channels, being snatched up and used by companies like Facebook and Google, without ever thinking of the consequences.

From The Daily Dot:

“Individuals carrying smartphones and connecting with services such as Google or Facebook have agreed, often without conscious consideration, to policies that grant these service providers explicit rights to harvest and utilize personal data on a massive scale,” the inventors explain on the x.pose website.

“We have already ceded control of our digital data emissions, x.pose goes a step further to broadcast the wearer’s data for anyone and everyone to see.”

That’s a really interesting idea and a great reminder not to over share on the internet. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a very sad, very 2005 LiveJournal to delete.