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Wearable guitar instrument shirt by Richard Helmer

14 Nov '06
2 min read

Led by engineer Dr Richard Helmer a team of researchers at Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation Textiles and Fibre Technology (TF) in Geelong has created a 'wearable instrument shirt' (WIS) which enables users to play an 'air guitar' simply by moving one arm to pick chords and the other to strum the imaginary instrument's strings.

In this five-minute podcast, Dr Richard Helmer talks about a t-shirt that lets the user play real music on an air guitar.

In a project intended to demonstrate the potential of technical textiles, a team led by Research Engineer Dr Richard Helmer created an objectless musical instrument, or 'air guitar'.

It works by embedding sensors into a shirt, allowing a computer to recognising and interpreting arm movements and produce the sounds of the instrument.

In this podcast, Dr Helmer talks about how the air guitar shirt works and how the same technology could be used for:

- computer control
- sports medicine
- rehabilitation after injuries
- diving

The air guitar consists of a wearable sensor interface embedded in a conventional 'shirt' which uses custom software to map gestures with audio samples.

Freedom of movement is a great feature of these textile-based interfaces. It's an easy-to-use, virtual instrument that allows real-time music making – even by players without significant musical or computing skills.

Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation Textiles

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