Beat this! A fabric that changes colours

What if you can change colours of your clothes to suit the ambiance of where you can be just like a chameleon?

This could soon be a reality as a textile designer has now come up with an interactive electronic fabric that can change colours in seconds using a number of electronic devices.

In Photo - for representational purpose only - a Model displays the creations of fashion designer Zubair Kirmani during the Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week in New Delhi (Courtesy: Indian Photo Agency)

"My main interest in textile design is the dynamically changing surfaces, structures, integrating interactive technologies into textiles,” said Budapest-based textile designer Judit Eszter Karpati who created the interactive fabric using computer programming, engineering and electronic devices.

The fabric includes two moving textile 'displays' that can change colour and pattern and react when they are heated up or when pressure is applied.

The fabric consists of ‘arduino' (a microcontroller) with 12V power supply and 20 custom PCBs (printed circuit boards) driving and controlling four industrial 24V DC power supplies, that heat two handmade textile woven with nichrome wires and screen-printed with thermochromatic dying, revealing the pre-programmed patterns.

“The patterns are generated from sound files. The heat sensitive static patterns create dynamically changing patterns,” Karpati was quoted as saying.

The spectators also can leave traces on the surface through the sense of touch, she added.

Further research could make the fabric wearable, the designer maintained. - IANS