A hypnotist’s spiral is a device for taking attention. It draws the eye, holds it, and the holding is the point.
The Hypnotize Dress — by Dutch designer and engineer Anouk Wipprecht, built with the neurotechnology company g.tec — runs that backwards. The spirals don’t capture the wearer’s attention. They report it.
What’s in it
- Eight pairs of the Round Display for XIAO and the XIAO ESP32-S3, arranged in a ring across the chest
- Each display spins a black-and-white spiral
- One more XIAO driving the LEDs on the dress
- A g.tec Unicorn BCI-Core EEG system reading brain activity
The signal chain is refreshingly simple to describe: the Unicorn produces a concentration value from 0 to 100, and that number sets the animation speed of the spirals. Concentrate harder, they spin faster.
The engineering choice worth noticing
Eight displays, and each one has its own microcontroller.
That is not the obvious architecture. The obvious architecture is one reasonably powerful board driving eight screens over SPI with a multiplexer or chip-select lines, which is cheaper in parts and is how most multi-display projects are built.
Giving each display a dedicated XIAO ESP32-S3 buys two things that matter enormously in a garment:
Rendering stays smooth. Eight animated spirals from one MCU means one framebuffer pipeline divided eight ways, and any hitch — a slow EEG packet, a wireless retry — stutters all eight at once. Eight independent renderers each run their own smooth animation and only need a number delivered occasionally. The animation is local; only the parameter is remote.
Wiring becomes tractable. This is a dress. Every signal line is a wire that has to survive being worn, sat down in, and moved around in. A centralised design needs eight display buses radiating from one point through fabric. A distributed design needs power and a low-rate control path, and each display module is a self-contained unit an arm’s length of wire away.
It is the same reasoning that pushes LED installations toward addressable strips with per-pixel logic rather than centrally driven matrices: push computation to the edge and the cabling problem collapses. Worth stealing for any wearable or soft-circuit project with multiple output devices.
Why the inversion is a good idea
Most BCI art uses EEG to control something external — a projection, a sound, a robot. The wearer becomes an operator of a system pointed away from them.
Putting the readout on the body, facing outward, changes who the piece is for. The wearer cannot see the eight spirals across their own chest without a mirror. Everyone else can. So the dress is not feedback for the person wearing it; it is disclosure to the people looking at them.
That is a genuinely uncomfortable proposition, and Wipprecht’s work has consistently been about exactly that discomfort — the Spider Dress that struck out when someone came too close, the ScreenDress whose eyes tracked and blinked according to the wearer’s cognitive load. The recurring subject is the body as an involuntary broadcaster, and the recurring question is whether you would consent to wearing your internal state where others can read it.
The spiral makes that pointed. A fast-spinning spiral reads as intense, and a still one reads as absent. Neither is a state you would necessarily choose to announce in a room full of people.
The honest caveats about the signal
“Concentration” from consumer-grade EEG is a derived index, not a measurement of attention. Systems like this typically compute it from band-power ratios — commonly the relationship between beta activity and alpha or theta. It correlates with engaged, effortful mental states and it is genuinely responsive, which is why it works as an expressive control signal.
But it is also perturbed by jaw clench, eye movement, blinking, neck tension and electrode contact quality. In a live setting on a moving performer, a good fraction of the variance is motion artefact rather than cognition.
Which is fine — arguably better than fine — for a piece like this. The dress does not need a valid measurement of attention. It needs a legible, responsive, embodied signal that the wearer can influence and an audience can read. That it is noisy and somewhat involuntary is closer to the artistic point than a clean number would be.
For anyone building in this space, that distinction is the one to hold onto: an EEG index is a good instrument and a bad instrument-of-record. Use it to drive expression. Do not claim it measures a mind.