Hasta La Ideas

A nod to Daft Punk?

Don’t be fooled by the pictures, this light-up headgear is more DIY tech than discotheque. The brainchild of Wouter Walmink, Alan Chatham and Floyd Mueller of RMIT’s Exertion Games Lab, the “LumaHelm” certainly isn’t the first bicycle illumination concept we’ve seen, but it might be the smartest one… not least because it’s attached one’s cranium as opposed to one’s conveyance (no offense to Mitchell Silva et al). The prototype is an off-the-shelf helmet that’s been augmented—at once hacked and adorned—with several LED strips, such that the array of 104 multicolored lights is mapped evenly onto the hemisperical surface (they left the padding intact to ensure that it still meets safety standards). An accelerometer serves as an input for Processing via Arduino: deliberate motions of the head activate corresponding sections of the surface, approximating left and right turn signals, as well as braking (with a quick backwards tic). A translucent vacuum-formed shell serves to protect the LEDs and diffuse the light they emit.

While the safety applications of the LumaHelm are obvious, the designers abide by a broader outlook, emphasizing the potential of light as a medium for expression.

LumaHelm turns the helmet into a display through which we can communicate, express and play. We are exploring how this can make cycling safer, skateboarding more expressive, improve communication on construction sites, and affect any other activity requiring a helmet. Through this design and research process we want to find out what wearable technology in the future may look like and how it can be more intimately integrated in our everyday lives.

In an interview with ABC Radio, Walmink notes that the materials cost them about $400 and that they’re planning on releasing instructions so that the average DIYer have the means to make their own LumaHelm. And while commercial availability is still a long-term goal, he comments that an LED-embedded hardhat might bypass the noise issues specific to construction sites as a new form of communication.

Photo by Craig Sillitoe for The Age

Thus, the project is as much a thought experiment as a cycling solution, a new way to broadcast our thoughts in an RGB dot matrix that happens to enclose their very source.

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