Keywords

1 Introduction

Across different countries and cultures, hair decoration plays a great role in embellishing human beings, not only for beauty, but also for social status indication and religious practices. As the evolution of history and technology, different kinds of material have been taken used to decorate people’s hair and outlook. We believe that bringing digital and intelligence elements into personal hair decoration can fresh not only the aesthetic expression of our identity and behavior, but also enrich the functions of hair decoration.

VisHair is a lighting interactive system towards personal fashion based on wearable technology. It mainly discusses how light media emerges in our daily fashion life and the new possibilities brought with interaction, visualization and intelligence. Based on LED system, different light texture and color were carried out and discussed.

2 Related Work

LED Light is a flexible media used in digital art, and information display. Through coding and designing, it metaphorically conveys information like human movement, emotions and attitudes with its aesthetic features, such as light intensity, dynamic and colors. Being related to our work, Gravity of Light [1], a LED hat has been designed to mimic the field with gravity according to human movement. And Situated Apparel [2], a wearable LED display system, has been designed to display dynamic information during the outdoor sport and situated communication. Many researchers and explorations have been done to analyze sociable and emotional communication within public space scenarios, such as Chit Chat Club [3] and Telemurals [4]. Dunne [5] explore areas of significant potential for the development of smart clothing, and identify the design barriers of achieving commercialization of these applications in four major areas: functionality, manufacture, developmental practice, and consumer acceptance. Vega et al. [6] explored body’s surface as an interactive platform by integrating technology into beauty products applied directly to one’s skin, fingernails and hair.

Based on prior studies and social psychology theory, the emotional identity and resonance can be stimulated by cross-infection and interoperability obtained in communication scenarios. Thus, we designed and published the LightingHair system [7] in CHI 2017 which claimed a basic hair-like lighting device with a little interaction extension. Not much attentions to the visualization, expression and communication.

3 System Description

VisHair system is an upgrade from the LightingHair that contains three parts, a head mounted part, an arm wearable part, and a mobile software process platform. The head mounted part is HairSlice which is used to do the fashion job by displaying the beauty of lights. However, the arm wearable part is SmartBand which response for the interaction with the wearer. Both wearable parts contain sensors, but the main data transferring part is contained in arm wearable part. Mobile phone is playing a critical role in the whole system because of its strong data processing capabilities. Thus, the mobile end is responsible for all the data calculation, pattern recognition and light form generation.

3.1 Interaction Framework

Figure 1 shows the framework of hair decoration and environment. Originally, physical situation, social environment and personal preference are essential keys to people’s outlook and hair style. VisHair amplifies the interactions between hair decoration and wearer, external environment through visualization and behavior interaction. The VisHair system has two data inputs (the monitoring data from sensors and the data manually entered from mobile terminal). HairSlice consists full-color LED for output, Arduino [8] for computational processing, and Bluetooth for data transportation.

Fig. 1.
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Interaction framework of VisHair

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3.2 Hardware

HairSlice.

Taking use of optical fiber, it mimics the shape of hair to perform a good visual fusion. HairSlice is basically a unit with a bunch of several optical fibers planted in a Bluetooth data transferring root. Both body-glowing and tip-glowing optical fibers [9] are used in hair slice. They share different LED light source so they can be turned ON/OFF separately according to the mobile APP’s command. Each hair slice unit can be attached to wearer’s hair with a clip and has its own battery. Full-color LED can display static or dynamic lights with almost all colors. Furthermore, the user can feel the light from fiber’s tips and halo without looking directly at light. For other people around, the gorgeous e-fashion is not glaring light pollution. Figure 2(a) and (b) show the constructure of a HairSlice unit. It can communicate with SmartBand and mobile APP through Bluetooth, and display different colors with LED.

Fig. 2.
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(a) Constructure of HairSlice (b) Image of HairSlice unit (c) Compositions of SmartBand

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SmartBand.

Consists of mini Arduino, Bluetooth, heart rate sensor, photosensor, accelerometer, three-axis gyro and battery, it collects data of human movement and heart rate, then communicate with the HairSlice units (see Fig. 2(c)) in realtime.

Currently the whole prototype hardware system is not as small as a perfect wearable device because the modules we use are universal modules which are commonly used in all kinds of smart devices. With integration improvements, we can reduce the band size to a common watch.

3.3 Software

Beyond the data transfer software running on Arduino, VisHair system relies more on the mobile software system. The APP “vishair” actually handles all functions from light effect generation to user interaction recognition. The interface only shows user an input and control entrance, but many things are running behind. What the software handles:

  • Separate HairSlice units control.

  • User customization input such as color mode customization.

  • Wearer heart rate calculation and emotion mode pattern match.

  • Wearer arm movement detection and control gesture pattern match.

  • Ambient light detection and control pattern match.

  • Receiving from other wears’ system and response pattern match.

3.4 Wear and Control

For traditional hair decoration, people comb and fix hair with accessories, and observe the appearance with a mirror. For VisHair, people can wear it and set static or dynamic colors for each lighting unit according to personal preference.

When the system is newly turned on, according to the photosensor embodied in SmartBand, HairSlice units will keep off in bright ambient and turn on in dark ambient. It is set to be automatic. User can turn it into manual through the mobile APP named “vishair”. Besides, VisHair can also display lighting colors according to digital pictures.

After wearing the HairSlice units and making the connection with mobile APP, the wearer can set the numbers and positions of the units through “vishair”. Set color for each unit according to personal preference (see Fig. 4).

While wearing the SmartBand part, arm control is involved to control ON/OFF and effect intensity of the HairSlice units.

Reproducibility and customizability are instincts of fashion. For VisHair, the application of optical fiber allows wearers to customize their own appearance. Besides, the unique appearance of optical fibers with loose end also provides more aesthetics in dynamic. To clearly show how VisHair works, the following content describes it without form customization (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3.
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Wearing VisHair without restyle

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4 Interactive Application Scenarios

Based on the prototype of VisHair, we organized 3 scenario tests for different level functions: self-awareness, affective visualization and social interaction. In each test, there were ten local users. We picked all female users because it is fashion related and hair decoration is very gender oriented. Despite of very few cases, Chinese males cares less about their hair color even if they care much about personal fashion. All users are aged between 17 to 30, not married. Most of them are college students. They wore prototype devices in every test and were given certain tasks to perform.

4.1 Scenario 1: Self-awareness

VisHair is designed to be interactive. Scenario 1 involves HairSlice and “vishair” – the mobile APP. The users were told to accomplish three color switching tasks while wearing HairSlice units. The first two tasks are to pick their two favorite colors for their HairSlice. The third one is to pick a dynamic color pattern for HairSlice (see Fig. 4). After that, they were given 5 min for free play.

Fig. 4.
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Scenario 1 of lighting control through “vishair” (Color figure online)

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All users showed great interests during the color switching tasks. The after-interview proved this phenomena we observed. Even more interesting, 8 users found the “photo match” function which is another type of color switching function according to the photos in your mobile device’s album or from your real-time taken. They all enjoyed it and tried with several photos.

4.2 Scenario 2: Affective Visualization

The second scenario test is affective visualization which is to express human’s emotion visually with VisHair.

Arousal is a vital element in PAD emotion theory [10]. HRV can reveal people’s arousal situation [10]. Since color has a great performance to express affection [11] according to psychological and physiological theories, here we brought dynamic colored lighting to indicate the wearer’s arousal situation according to the heart rate detected [12] with the heart rate sensor.

The test mainly involves HairSlice and SmartBand. But user needs “vishair” to switch to the “emotion mode”. The users were given images picked from the date-sets of International Affective Picture System (IAPS) [13] which is classified already. All users were navigating through the same images with the same sequence and the same period of time.

The system is set to have green and slow dynamic lighting for low hear rate to express calm. Blue and medium dynamic is for medium heart rate to express sad. Red and fast dynamic is for high heart rate to express happy.

During the test, the dynamic colors shifted between green, blue, and red. The users showed their interests. But only 4 users thought they want to express their emotion with this demonstration-like style. In the after-interview, even those 4 expressed they would only use this mode in particular situations.

Notice the affective cognition with heart rate may not accurate here, and need more experimental data support.

4.3 Scenario 3: Social Interaction

The third scenario test is social interaction which involves HairSlice, SmartBand, and “vishair”.

Social interaction means communication between users’ systems. Different wearers can contrast a social network. In entertainment scenarios such as party or living concert, different wearers can change colors in VisHair for each other. During the interactive process, such openness experience can help to evolve a game-like, interesting feeling for the wearer who change the color. For whom being changed, he/she can experience surprise and joy. And for others, they will observe and enjoy the color-changing.

Currently the social interaction mode is set to sync modes between two or more friends. We haven’t researched deeply into the complex social interaction situations. So we divided users into 5 groups. The first task is one on one sync. Each group has a starter and a joiner. The starter will initiate a friend group. This group can be set open publicly or secretly which means if the joiner needs a password to join or not. The second task is big group sync. 5 groups will be gathered in one room and be synced one by one. The interesting part is in this situation, if the groups happen to have the same light mode and they don’t want to sync, the VisHair will bounce to another mode automatically like a bouncing ball.

This test is not about the function test. Just to show if the users are interested about this mode. The observation and the after-interview showed positive feedbacks. All users wanted social interaction with visual expressions. And they like this lighting decoration effects in social interactions. We presume this is because of the user age and occupation. They are too much alike to show the difference. We may achieve huge different feedbacks if we involve different kind of users. We need to research deeper into this field to find more valuable modes in social interaction context.

5 Discussion

We introduce a wearable fashion hair lighting interaction system with three level of functions: a self-customizable hair lighting decoration method, a user-status defined interactive hair lighting decoration method, and a multi-user interactive hair lighting decoration method. We then used three scenarios to test those methods (see Figs. 4, 5 and 6).

Fig. 5.
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Affective visualization (a) Calm, (b) Sad and (c) Happy (Color figure online)

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Fig. 6.
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Interaction in entertainment scenario

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VisHair offers the following advantages: (1) Customizable personal hair decoration with hair-like and energy-saving LED lights. (2) Cool unlimited effect compared to traditional hair dying to increase confidence among people. (3) New visualization and expression method for single user or group of users.

VisHair is also subject to limitations: (1) The decoration effect is now limited in several bunches of HairSlice units because of the limitations of the unit size, the Arduino control capabilities. (2) Some user interaction recognition is not very accurate for some critical application. More sensors and new detection methods should be introduced to improve the accuracy issue.

6 Conclusion and Future Work

Through exploration of different scenarios, it can be seen that bringing digital and intelligent elements into hair decoration provides new functions and aesthetic expressions of hair decoration. Except for the ability of decoration our appearance, it can also become a data collection and display interface.

For future work, we will explore more interactive possibilities, such as interacting with sound or music. Involving and incorporating additional sensors and display. This will bring more applications in entertainment, sport and fashion.