High technology has reached almost every industry there is and now it is seeping into the textile business, beginning with a type of cloth that amazingly changes colors depending on its environment by reacting to touch and sound.
Dubbed as Chromosonic, the avant-garde fabric uses an out-of-the-box technology called Electronic Programmable Textile Interface, making it more sensitive to heat and react to it accordingly by producing colorful shifting patterns. It makes one think of Hypercolor, or the line of shirts and shorts that boast color-changing fabrics when exposed to heat.
However, unlike the Hypercolor clothing that is made with thermochromes or substances that change color due to temperature change, this brainchild of Hungarian textile designer and inventor Judit Eszter Karpati is more advanced, as it boasts a microcontroller called "arduino" with a 12V power supply, and roughly 20 custom printed circuit boards (PCBs).
These two main components drive and control four industrial 24V DC power supplies, which are the ones responsible for heating the two moving textile "displays" included in the long canvas decorated in thick stripes with varying colors that ranges from black and indigo to white and washed red.
The two textile displays are made of thin nichrome wires woven together and screen-printed with thermochromatic dye, which are then pre-programmed to encompass eye-catching patterns with Karpati's technology.
Chromosonic can also delight users with the traces they may leave on the fabric after applying pressure on it. For example, pressing the palm of one's hand could make an impression on the cloth for a brief second. The fabric can also "dance" with the user's music, as it reacts via the "arduino" that processes audio files to generate heat.
Karpati, who is currently studying at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, created Chromosonic as part of her master's degree, and she plans on making fashion and textile design as interactive works of art with the use of programming, engineering and all kinds of electronic devices.
"[The] Chromosonic research project investigates how the world of digital media becomes tangible through the textile medium," she said. "My intention [is about] broadening the field of textile craft and design to media design."
Chromosonic is not yet wearable but Karpati hopes to conduct more research and develop her invention and who knows, we might be able to achieve high fashion anytime soon literally, with clothes that matches the color of your top or your mood and your playlist, all in just a snap.
