Japanese design innovative firm, Takram, has developed a new smart fabric with Augmented Reality (AR) capabilities. The fabric being is designed to capture performance data for a London Transport Museum (LTM) project.
The data captured by the fabric, which is firstly integrated into AR technology with internet of Things (IoT) connected live data, is believed to offer insight into customer behaviour as well as to alert about the maintenance issues. The prototype is developed for TfL (Transport for London) tubes and buses, but the application can also be used in rail and aviation, among other areas.
According to Takram, “Our aim was to create a beautiful and usable ‘smart’ textile that can actively help to improve planning and maintenance on London Transport’s busy network of trains and buses and can apply an AR interface to engage customers in the journey experience in different ways.”
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Takram’s goal was to create a textile that could record and map the applied pressure and visualise the data on an augmented-reality interface. Hence a concept is developed with a TC2 digital jacquard loom, into which switches and AR markers are woven into an abstract pattern using electronics and conductive yarn.
This whole process further correlates the pressure map to time and location data enabling the IoT-connected textile to offer an exact picture of where, when and to what extent textiles can be used on London’s transport network.
Larissa Kuntel, Design Engineer at Takram says, “We looked for a way to make live data perform in unexpected ways, and by introducing AR into the fabric, we can invite interactions that inform, entertain and engage users in the data through different narratives and devices,” adding, “The possibilities are limited only by the imagination – the textile can output live data to create installations and experiences that enrich a journey or an environment.”
