Become a chameleon with this color changing fabric

05-12-2014 • http://www.dvice.com, Robin Burks

And what better way to do that than taking a cue from nature? The chameleon can change the color of its skin, so wouldn’t it be cool if we could to? Textile designer Judit Eszter Karpati may have found a way to do that, thanks to the use of an experimental fabric she created that changes color on the fly.

Remember those t-shirts in the 1980’s that changed color with your body temperature? Those shirts used a conductive dye. Karpati’s material, Chromosonic, also uses conductive dye, but the rest of the color-changing process is much more high-tech: nichrome wires are woven into the fabric and connected to an Arduino microcontroller, which is connected to a power supply. When the wires heat up in response to sound, the temperature changes, affecting the dye and making the fabric change color and pattern.

With this research project, Karpati intended to explore how textile arts and digital could combine and interact. She said on her Vimeo page: