We built this shirt on rock and roll
Guitar Hero? Try Air Guitar Hero. A shirt developed by the CSIRO lets rockers make music without needing an instrument.
Behind the lab doors of the CSIRO's Geelong outpost, there's a whole lotta rocking going on.
The organisation's Textiles and Fibre Technology department has created a "wearable instrument shirt", or WIS, which allows air guitarists to make real-time music with their invisible instrument.
The player's arm movements are registered via an embedded sensor interface, then relayed wirelessly to a computer, where software tweaked by the CSIRO matches every strum of the strings with audio samples.
If shredding through More Than A Feeling at expert level on PS2's Guitar Hero is no longer a challenge, perhaps the WIS is for you. While you can't pick one up at Myer just yet, the systems used in the garment's development are set to be seen in a range of wearable products.
"The technology -- which is adaptable to almost any kind of apparel -- takes clothing beyond its traditional role of protection and fashion into the realms of entertainment and a wide range of other applications including the development of clothes which will be able to monitor physiological changes," said guitar shirt engineer Dr Richard Helmer in a CSIRO statement.
To see the shredder shirt in action, check out the CSIRO's video clips (complete with psychedelic post-production effects) here. If you're interested in the science behind the shirt, have a read of the project page.