Having moving parts is the Holy Grail of any good costume, and one cosplayer has gone above and beyond — creating moving, light up wings that are controlled by an Android app. This cosplay MacGyver used all sorts of bits to make his huge wings, including microwave parts, pieces of a bedframe and shelving unit, and a PC power supply and motherboard.
Back in 2008, I remember seeing a video of a cosplayer who had integrated a couple of windscreen-wiper motors into his costume, using that and a huge, chunky battery on his belt to spread a pair of bat-wings on his back. The motors managed to lift the wings once, twice before they burnt out, but the crowd went wild for it. These days, that’s nothing. One League of Legends costumer, Elmins Cosplay, has created wings that both move and light up for his Aether Wing Kayle cosplay — with all the mechanics being controlled from an Android app.
The scale isn’t as apparent in the video, but once the wings are on Elmins himself, it’s obvious how huge a feat it is to move these wings mechanically. What’s more, it’s the first costume he ever made, and he designed the frame from scratch in keeping with an exact model of the in-game character. So how does it work? “It’s controlled by an Arduino microcontroller, has 9 motors/servos, which rotate the smaller 4 feathers on each, lift the wings, and rotate the top sections on the wings,” Elmins tells me. With incredible costumes like this one popping up more and more often, it can’t be long until cosplayers will need a degree in engineering just to keep up.