Euveka’s shape-shifting robotic mannequin #Wearables
Interesting interview with Audrey-Laure Bergenthal, president and CEO of Euveka, Via TechCrunch
Some ideas you hear and they immediately make sense. Some take a minute, but the more you think about them, the better they seem. Euveka, a mannequin for clothing designers that can change shape and size in seconds, is the latter — and I think it may eventually be a standard item in any fashion studio and a fair few other industries.
It’s not something I ever really thought about, but designers don’t just create one version of a shirt or jacket and then scale it up and down (well, good ones don’t). They need to design and refit it for different body types, allowing for the many shapes humans take and the ways that shape changes with time or activity.
That means lots and lots of mannequins. Big, small, short, tall, pregnant, broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped and everything else. It would be nice to just be able to dial in the exact size and shape you’re designing for, right?
That’s Euveka. Under the standard soft, pin-friendly cover (stretchable, naturally) is a set of mechanisms that can change all kinds of measurements, quickly and (ahem) seamlessly.
Shoulders, bust, chest, waist, hips, thighs and height can be independently adjusted, as well as general, shall we say, robustity — allowing for the realistic replication of body types from a 5′ pregnant woman to a 6’3″ basketball player.
The changes happen over a few tens of seconds, and yet so slowly that you may not even be able to tell when it’s growing, shrinking or otherwise reconfiguring. It’s all done with an attached application that also warns of unsafe pressures or chemicals if they’re detected.
I spoke with Audrey-Laure Bergenthal, president and CEO of Euveka, at CES. She and the others on the team helped expand my mind a bit as to what something like this enables.
“There’s fashion, of course,” she said. “But also medical, sports, security — any time there’s a question of morphology.