THE makers of Morphsuits have reached a multi-million-pound deal with Marvel Super Heroes for fancy dress costumes that interact with smartphones to show "special effects".
The skin-tight Scotland-designed suits use Nasa technology that allows wearers to show images related to their character's powers on their phone. The devices sit in chest plate compartment and are connected to a person's movement.
The all-in-one costume range created a sensation when launched flat five years ago.
The deal with the famous world-wide franchise is the latest in a global push by former Edinburgh flat-mates Gregor Lawson and brothers Fraser and Ali Smeaton, who launched the party costumes that let wearers see others while remaining anonymous.
The latest £44.95 suits have generated about £2 million worth of inquiries for Spider-Man alone.
The "wearable technology" element of the Marvel Morphsuits was partly developed by Mark Rober, an engineer on the Mars Rover, who teamed up with the Scots firm last year to launch what is claimed to be the world's first such fancy dress costume.
Wearers download an app that allows their smartphone to show video of character traits such as Spider-Man shooting a web.
Other ideas from the designers include Halloween costumes with open chest wounds filled with flesh-eating maggots or a beating heart, and jumpers showing animated log fires for Christmas.
They are to create the new costumes for the Marvel Super Heroes in Europe. The founders each put in £3000 to the venture and now the expanding empire handles £11m a year.
Mr Lawson said: "Creating Marvel costumes has long been a dream of ours and they are easily the most popular requests from our fans - we've had over 50 thousand searches for Spider-Man alone on our website.
"So when the opportunity arose we wanted to make sure they were the best costumes ever produced and that's what we have achieved."
He added: "By downloading the smartphone app, users can bring the costumes to life by picking the relevant animation which turns smartphone handsets into integral, animated costume elements.
"We haven't quite cracked invincibility, Spidey senses or accelerated healing yet, but we're working on it."
Why are you making commenting on HeraldScotland only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereCommments are closed on this article