Award-Winning T shirt Lets you Play Air Guitar

... or go back

Just when real-life couldn't get any weirder, a company in Cardiff have developed a t shirt that responds to people playing air guitar - miming playing guitar simply using hand placement - and were given a technology award for their innovative design. Naturally the award comes from Austin, Texas (which likes to think of itself as the Live Music Capital of the World), and it can be used with any kind of music; all you need is the t shirt and a hand. This great idea could take role-playing into the next generation, but the air-guitar t shirt innovation is exciting just by itself.

The award winners gained the Bootstrap award for their technology in Austin this year, and their t shirt looks to have captured the imaginations of the bands at the SXSW music and technology festival being held there. The Bootstrap award is given to innovative technology designs which require little capital, and that is exactly the description for this important piece of technology. The t shirt was originally invented for the band The Last Republic, a rock band from Wales, but one of the inventors considers that their design is able to go much further than just local bands, and there is now a worldwide patent on the t shirt.


The t shirt works using a complicated system of scanning using a simple webcam connected to a program. The t shirt itself has an inscribed bar-code on the front of the shirt which can be detected by the scanner, rather like a bar-code at a supermarket. The user puts on the t shirt with the barcode displayed clearly at the front, and then starts to 'strum' the guitar to the music. Each time the hand passes over the part of the t shirt which is coded, the hand blocks the signal, and the user is given a point.

The design of the t shirt is basic, but once the idea takes off bands could print their own specially-designed t shirt, and get different points for strumming according to a particular song. The potential for individual bands to have branded t shirt designs and points for particular songs is enormous. The design is also easy to use and t shirts could be re-fashioned to create games on computer consoles, opening up fight games or similar, giving you a realistic strike area, for example.

FauvelKhan, the company behind the t shirt, hopes that people will use their invention to get closer to a band, and that the t shirt will also allow greater connection between the band and its audience, something that many major bands pay a great deal of attention to. Creating a whole new atmosphere which will surely bring singers and their fans even more closely together, and creating a sense of unity that will go beyond the usual gig or festival. The chances are also that someone will create home computer software which will transform the t shirt from a one-off design into a fully interactive creation. This means that the design could change the way that people interact with computer games, forever.
The chances are also that someone will create home computer software which will transform the t shirt from a one-off design into a fully interactive creation.

Article author: sifat ullah - click here to see more articles by this author

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