After a lack of electronics projects, I had the idea to experiment with the WiFi enabled ESP8266 chip. For a highly creative music festival I visited in summer 2016, I had the idea of using a LED-tophat as an entertainment wearable, but also experiment with social dynamics in a festival crowd.
So far, I built all the electronics into the hat and sewed 160 LEDs onto it in stripes. The LED-matrix can be controlled via a web interface (eppfel/esp8266-fastled-webserver on github.com) integrated into the hat itself, so everyone with a smartphone in WiFi range is able to control it.
Web server interface of LED tophatI was able to display text, but did not yet incorporate this into the existing code. I would really like to explore, how people would use the wearer with the hat on, as a display. Further I attached a microphone to sync the animations to the surroundings in the next iteration of project.