Your stupid, low-tech t-shirts. All they do is sit there. You can’t even hook them into a computer and control instruments live. Pathetic. John Malloy points us to a project by Dr. Richard Helmer, an engineer from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) in Belment, Australia. By embedding “textile motion sensors” (using conductive fibers, basically, so the fabric becomes a big set of resistors), you can play a real air guitar:
Air guitar T-shirt rocks for real [BBC News]
It’s not rocket science… it’s rockin’ science [CSIRO Article; site is a little slow, probably because of BBC traffic!]
The textile end is just half the equation; the team built custom software for interpreting gestures. It even maps to both right- and left-handed wearers, so us rightie elitists can’t continue to abuse the downtrodden lefties of the world.
Don’t like guitars? They’ve played tambourine and guiro, too.
For related projects, see CDM’s wearable tag.
Any CDM readers out there who have played with conductive textiles? (Come on, NYU ITP students, I know you’re reading.)
[tags]fashion, wearable, physical-computing, sensors, hardware, guitars, oddities[/tags]