While I personally find the cynicism of Cyberpunk 2077’s world wearying, I can’t deny Night City has got style. A number of nerdy clothing lines have attempted to recreate V’s iconic Samurai jacket, but the standing, light-up collar presents an obvious practical challenge to realise. One YouTuber has decided they’re up to the task.
Hardware creator and cosplayer Zibartas has already crafted several Cyberpunk 2077 props, including motorised mantis arm blades and an Arasaka helmet. They’ve also made the yellow bomber jacket featured in the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners anime, incorporating LEDs into the standing collar to create the light-up effect. However, Zibartas has now remade the jacket with a significant hardware upgrade: a flexible OLED collar (via Hackaday).
Zibartas set their sights on recreating the rare black and white variant of V’s bomber jacket, the NUSA infiltrator jacket seen in the Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty expansion. In-game, the inner collar features an animated display, so the creator set to work creating a collar lined with flexible OLEDs, though this was far from straightforward.
“My idea is to get a few of these panels and make a full wraparound screen and hide the hardware and the lining. They’re mostly made for flagship phones and tablets, so the sizes are limited and they’re quite expensive,” they explain.
“I paid around $300 for one panel, and I need four for the entire collar. Ouch.”
(Image credit: Zibartas)
Then there was the issue of getting even just two of the flexible OLEDs to play synchronised video. Wearable projects like this favour tiny Raspberry Pi computers for practicality’s sake, but this features a single hardware decoder that can only play one video smoothly, causing the image to stutter across multiple devices.
Zibartas downgraded to the older but “less restricted” Raspberry Pi 4, allowing them to create a workaround that would enable the single decoder to work smoothly across two screens. This alone took a week’s worth of work.
Constructing the base of the collar out of fabric and EVA foam appeared to go much more smoothly until it came time to do a test fitting with one of the flexible OLEDs. Though this tech is billed as ‘flexible,’ they’re actually very fragile and cannot withstand being twisted. Zibartas went with a sandwich design for the collar base, aiming to simply slide the OLEDs into place—unfortunately, this led to “a sad and an expensive setback.”
“While the screens are flexible, the conductors running to them are not as much. And my sandwich design expected them to survive a bend that they were not meant to,” the cosplay creator explains.
LG’s flexible screen. Note how delicately the conductors on the left side are being held. (Image credit: LG)
After many more weeks of iteration, Zibartas created a “semi-rigid understructure” that is flexible but resistant to twisting. The flexible OLEDs are slid into place along a track, before hard end caps are carefully applied to protect the delicate conductors that broke last time.
As the flexible OLED screens are Linux and HDMI-compatible, Zibartas can even play Cyberpunk 2077 via the collar of the jacket. After this understructure is applied to the EVA foam base, that just leaves the rest of the jacket.
Zibartas playing Cyberpunk 2077 on the OLED collar of their Cyberpunk 2077 cosplay jacket…with the old Steam controller. (Image credit: Zibartas)
Hand-crafting clothes is no easy feat, especially if you’re not working from a pre-existing pattern, but Zibartas tackles this part of the project with a software solution. “I designed the patterns from scratch in Clo 3D based on the in-game mesh and some screenshots,” The cosplayer explains.
They designed the jacket’s angular patches in Autodesk Fusion, ironing these heat-transfer designs onto black fabric before sewing the patches onto the jacket.
(Image credit: Zibartas)
“Getting to do more sewing was actually quite nice,” Zibartas continues, “Of course, it’s delicate work, but at least you will not fail so hard that you need to throw out absolutely everything and start from scratch.”
I have pretty mixed feelings about Cyberpunk 2077 itself (reviewing the game at launch on a PS4 Pro will do that—Harvey and Ted had the right idea by waiting a few years before playing it on PC). My feelings about textiles and technology coming together for cosplay recreations like this are much less complicated: This is rad, and I can’t wait to see what Zibartas stitches together in the future.
