Electromagnets!
Met with Joel Murphy the other day to discuss how to implement some of my interactive sculptural garment ideas. I told him about my googly-eye dress idea and as I had expected, he said it would involve creating electromagnets on the fly. This would be done by sending a current through a microcontroller connected through Arduino to a series of electromagnets made from tightly coiled magnetic wire. As seen in my Thing-a-Day Flash app, viewing certain parts of an image would cause different ports of the microcontroller to fire according to what part of the dress they were hooked up to. Joel advised me to use Processing instead of Flash, as it has a much more robust Arduino library. Because I was snowed in today and couldn't get out to go buy some magnetic wire, my project for today will instead be describing what my work tomorrow will entail.
Once I get a hold of some magnetic wire (basically just super light gauge wire, around 36g), I'm just going to test how difficult it is to create an electromagnet that my googly-eyes will respond to on the fly (see diagram above). Basically, I'll be connecting the coiled magnetic wire to a 9v battery, then testing it with a multimeter so see what (if anything) happens. I'll have to recreate my googly-eye setup, this time cutting up flat sheets of magnet into circles rather than painting the plastic pupils with magnetic paint (if I get that to work, I'll try the paint again). If the electromagnet is able to make the pupils react, then I'll have to dive into Arduino for reals to figure out how to control multiple electromagnets.