All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
What started out as a quest for a spare part that can morph shapes has taken the military's far-out researchers to a place not even they could have imagined going: the runway.
Meet the Darpa Hoodie, possibly the world's most efficient garment. Manufactured by San Francisco's Betabrand clothing designers, the shiny, oddly-seamed black-and-red hoodie – described by Betabrand as "the love child of Spiderman and a stealth fighter" – began life as an algorithm designed for one of Darpa's freakiest projects: Programmable Matter.
Programmable Matter is a quest to design a Transformer: objects that change their shape in response to an external command. (Betabrand prefers to compare it to the T-1000 from Terminator 2.) The military applications of Programmable Matter are wide-ranging: a universal spare part; an antenna that changes its dimensions in response to the communications system it uses; an army of shapeshifting human replicants. Engineers at Harvard and MIT have gotten as far as creating self-folding origami.
Two former MIT scientists with grant money from Programmable Matter, Jonathan Bachrach and Saul Griffith, now run an engineering and design studio in Frisco called Otherlab. As part of his Programmable Matter work, Bachrach, a spatial-computing guy, wrote algorithms for software that represents 3D shapes as their component flat panels, which can then be reassembled into different configurations. "Brainstorming with Saul, we started thinking about how that might work in the clothing industry," Bachrach says.
As it turns out, pretty easily. Their software took a representation of a man's head, neck and torso; distilled it down to its simplest shapes; and turned those very irregular shapes into panels to sew together. They took a mock-up to Betabrand founder Chris Lindland, a friend of Griffith's, who considered it "an interesting way of creating something that’s commonly made," Lindland says. Moved into production three weeks ago and offered for sale last Tuesday, Lindland says he's already sold between 50 and 60 Darpa Hoodies from a limited run of 100.
The whole thing is made out of a dozen panels of rip-resistant nylon, with a few zippers thrown in mostly for aesthetic purposes. The algorithm-derived panels mean there's no wasted cloth in the garment – the panels sew together in precisely the hoodie's silhouette. Fast Company's Co.Design blog approvingly described the aesthetic of the Darpa Hoodie as "zips and slashes everywhere that look pretty stylish."
A Darpa spokesman said he was unable to comment about the hoodie by press time – we'll update if Darpa has any additional reaction – and Bachrach demurs from saying how much grant money Otherlab has from the military researchers. Bachrach says that Darpa's encouraged the team to use software designed for Programmable Matter in commercial applications: "The idea is this could be useful as making body armor or something else difficult to make that’s custom fit to the human body."
Maybe an interim step is to give the Darpa guys some of their eponymous hoodies for a rainy day. "I haven't given them a Darpa Hoodie," Bachrach confesses, laughing. "I think they’d probably be happy about that."
See Also:
