U by Kotex Sport — "Glow Girl"

Andreas engineered a one-of-a-kind electronic light suit — made of around 2,500 individually-addressable LEDs — for an exciting new online campaign for U by Kotex Sport Ultrathins, via Ogilvy Sydney.

With no off-the-shelf solution available, either locally or internationally, the one-of-a-kind LED suit and its proprietary control software were designed and built entirely in-house at FSM.

More than a costume — a wearable animation engine

The suit isn’t a fixed lighting effect; it’s a real-time animation engine you can wear. At its heart, an ARM-class microcontroller streams full animation sequences frame by frame off an on-board memory card, runs them through a two-layer, alpha-compositing playback engine, and drives the entire LED array at a controlled frame rate — so animated content designed and rendered like any other piece of motion graphics plays across the body in real time.

Better still, it’s controlled wirelessly. A reliable, acknowledged radio link lets the suit be cued, triggered and adjusted live and untethered, with on-board controls and a display for direct, hands-on operation. Costume, electronics, custom firmware and a real-time display pipeline — all integrated into a single garment.

A genuinely multidisciplinary build

The industry is rapidly evolving, and we’re constantly looking at new technologies and innovative solutions to stay at the forefront of that change. This was one of those opportunities to embrace a different approach to the standard post-production solution.

The project drew on a host of disciplines working as one — designers, animators, software developers, hardware engineers, costume designers and compositors — with the proprietary hardware and control software engineered by Andreas Wanda.

View the “Behind the Lights” case study below, showcasing the creative technologies involved.

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