Breakfast New York

Forever21 is recreating your Instagram images with fabric and streaming them 24/7. A far cry from hi-def, the connected screen uses 6,400 spools of threaded fabric to display the photos as an 80×80 image. Each spool contains 36 colors that transition every inch and a half. All together that is 6.7 miles of threaded fabric. Based off of the image that is being displayed, the spools rotate to move the fabric so the appropriate color is visible for that pixel. The so-called Threadscreen was created for Forever21 by the amazing folks at Breakfast New York. We are always excited to see a new project emerge from Breakfast NY; they are responsible for one of our favorite innovative concepts, a connected street sign called Points (if you haven’t seen it yet, please check it out!). The Threadscreen took the rapid prototyping company over a year and a half to create and is incredibly complex. Besides the algorithms needed to accomplish things such as grabbing your selfie off of Instagram and transforming it into a 36 color image the screen understands how to display, the mechanics of screen are incredibly complex. How complex? Well most everything in the 2,000 pound display had to be built from scratch. To give you an idea of how daunting that is, there are approximately 200,000 parts, or 8 times as many parts as in your car!

Want to see your face in fabric? Simply add #F21ThreadScreen to your Instagram photo. Your image will then be added to the queue to be displayed. It could take a couple of days, but once the Threadscreen shows your image, a video of it will automatically be uploaded to YouTube and you can download a video of it from the Threadscreen’s website. While you won’t be seeing anything like this at your local Forever21 anytime soon, it is an impressive PR stunt! We love seeing ordinary materials, such as threaded fabric, used in such unusual ways. Head past the break for a video of how the screen works: