This Amazing Borg Costume Is Perfect for Star Trek Conventions
To pay homage to the Borg, Marcin Poblocki built this costume that rivals those seen on screen.
The Borg are a fictional group of alien cybernetic organisms from the Star Trek universe. They were first introduced in a second season episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called “Q Who?” The Borg aren’t a distinct alien species, but rather a manufactured race of individuals who are pulled into a hive mind called “The Collective.” As such, individual Borg vary in appearance. But they all tend to be covered in cybernetic augmentations. To pay homage to the Borg, Marcin Poblocki built this amazing costume, complete with lights and moving parts, that rivals those seen on screen.
This Borg costume is packed full of futuristic cybernetic enhancements, including an electroluminescent (EL) wire spine, LED-lit faceplate, and an animatronic arm covered in glowing lights. The base of the costume is motorcycle body armor, which was purchased on Wish for surprisingly little money. Poblocki1982 then spent more than 30 hours modeling the various attachments in Autodesk Fusion 360 computer-aided design software and Zbrush mesh-modeling software. Those attachments include the mask, the arm, the spine, and miscellaneous faux implants. They were all 3D-printed in small sections and then carefully glued together to form the full size attachments.
To make the costume more dynamic, Poblocki1982 added illuminated accents all over the place. The face mask contains a single red LED and the arm has several LEDs in various colors. The latter were attached to the arm at random points using a 3D printing pen. The spine piece has EL wire woven through it to impart a nice glowing effect. That receives power from its own dedicated inverter battery unit. The finishing touch was a pair of motorized rotating parts mounted to the arm. Those are actuated by hobby servo motors and are controlled by an Arduino Nano. Power for that comes from a 9V battery.
The result is a Borg costume that looks more than good enough to have actually been shown front-and-center in Star Trek: The Next Generation.