Forget putting a screen on your wrist. Researchers in Singapore have put one directly into the fabric.
A team at the National University of Singapore has developed what it calls the world’s first touchscreen integrated into a garment: a flexible sleeve that can display images and video, respond to touch and connect wirelessly to other devices, while still behaving like clothing.
The Fibers Are The Screen
There is no rigid display stitched onto the sleeve.
Instead, the researchers created electronic fibers that work as both pixels and touch sensors. The prototype combines 54 fibers, each containing 96 LEDs, to create a 96 x 54-pixel color display measuring roughly 17 by 10 centimeters.
It can play video at 30 frames per second, display photographs, run a calculator, act as a compass, respond to voice commands and receive images over Bluetooth. Additional fibers contain a microphone, speaker and sensors for movement, light and temperature.
In other words, many of the functions of an early smartphone are now sitting on someone’s sleeve.
And You Can Actually Wash It
That may be the most impressive part.
According to the research team, the display’s brightness and touch response remained almost unchanged after 50 machine washes with detergent and 1,000 bending cycles. The fabric also remains breathable at levels comparable with cotton, polyester and denim.
It is still firmly a research prototype. Resolution needs to improve, and the team wants to add more sensing capabilities and eventually on-device AI. Healthcare is one obvious direction, with clothing potentially monitoring physiological signals and displaying that information directly on the body.
Wearables May Stop Looking Like Devices
Wearable technology has mostly meant shrinking electronics into watches, rings, glasses and earbuds.
This research points somewhere else.
Instead of attaching technology to clothing, the clothing itself becomes the interface.
Google and Levi’s explored touch-sensitive fabric almost a decade ago with Project Jacquard. This takes the idea much further: not just controlling another device through fabric, but turning the fabric into the display itself.
The smartphone put a computer in our pocket.
The next interface might already be what we’re wearing.
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