T-Shirt Makes Air Guitar Music

Nov. 14, 2006 — It could make an ideal Christmas present in years to come. Australian scientists have built a t-shirt that lets you play "air guitar" for real.

Dr Richard Helmer and his CSIRO colleagues stitched wearable sensors into an ordinary long sleeved t-shirt to create a prototype of what they're calling a "wearable instrument shirt."

Simply by moving one arm to choose chords and the other to strum some imaginary strings, home rockers wearing the shirt could make actual music.

The tunes come courtesy of a pair of small but resilient sensors placed in the elbows of the t-shirt.

The sensors bend when you move your arm, sending wireless signals to custom software that turns them into audio samples.

"When you move your arm it bends a filament in the sensor, which changes its resistance," said Helmer. "It's a bit like a volume control."

One of the smart things about the technology is the sturdiness of the interface, Helmer said.

The materials can all stand up to ultraviolet light, moisture and movement, so working up a sweat is less likely to cause problems.

"It allows you to jump around and the sound generated is just like an original mp3," he said.

The shirt is part of a wider CSIRO program on intelligent fabrics that aims to tackle more serious applications like health monitoring or 3D computer interfaces.

So why design an air guitar?

"I thought we needed to do something that was a little less serious that people could have fun with," Helmer said.

In the meantime, the researchers aren't deaf to the possibility that their experiment could have commercial potential.

"It depends on how much people want it," Helmer said.

The price might start out relatively high, but over a year or two could drop down to "Christmas present level", the researcher says.

At this stage, no-one knows exactly how much it might retail for, but it would probably be in the hundreds of dollars, Helmer suggested.

A small price to pay, perhaps, for turning rock star fantasies into reality.