This Dress is An Introvert's Dream

Do you ever wish you had a sexy, robotic dress that made you look incredible but could also ward off creeps that attempt to touch you on the street? Thanks to designer and engineer Anouk Wipprecht and her "Spider Dress," that fantasy may soon be a reality.

The 3D-printed "Spider Dress" features "animatronic mechanical limbs" that move when an aggressor gets too close to the wearer, similar to the "Personal Space Dress" created by Kathleen McDermott (only ten times more vicious). "The dress provides an extension of the wearers intuition,” Wipprecht told Vice's Motherboard. "It uses proximity sensors as well as a respiration sensor to both define and protect the personal space of the wearer.”

In short, this dress is crazy intelligent. It even calibrates a response depending on exactly how a person sidles up to the woman lucky enough to be wearing it. As Wipprecht explained to Motherboard, "Approach the wearer too aggressively and the mechanical limbs move up to an attack position. Approach the system under calmer circumstance and the dress just might beckon you to come closer with smooth, suggestive gestures.”

Sure, the spider dress kind of looks like a wearable rib cage or an item from the costume closet of the Hunger Games movie franchise, but its design is super impressive. Motherboard explains that there are 20 proximity sensors embedded in the intricate framework of the garment, which is connected to an Intel Edison framework that helps the system engage with the wearer's environment.

Spider dress will be officially unveiled on January 6th at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. While I don't think this is a long-term solution to pervasive problems of harassment, I do know a few introverts who wouldn't mind having an attack dress on hand to shoo away any irritating strangers.