Intelligent textiles: designing a gesture-controlled illuminated textile based on computer vision

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) offers the potential for the development of e-textiles that give wearers a smart and intuitive experience. An emerging challenge in intelligent materials design is hand gesture recognition textiles. Most current research focuses on number gesture recognition via smart gloves, so there is a gap in research that studies contact-less number gesture recognition textiles via computer vision. Meanwhile, there is lack of exploration on the integration of illuminating function and number gesture recognition textiles to improve interactivity by real-time visualizing detection results. In this research, a novel interactive illuminating textile with a touch-less number gesture recognition function has been designed and fabricated by using an open-source AI model. It is used in sync with a polymeric optical fiber textile with illuminative features. The textile is color-changing, controlled by the system's mid-air interactive number gesture recognition capability and has a woven stripe pattern and a double-layer weave structure with open pockets to facilitate integration of the system's components. Also described here is a novel design process that permits textile design and intelligent technology to integrate seamlessly and in synchronization, so that design in effect mediates continuously between the physical textile and the intangible technology. Moreover, this design method serves as a reference for the integration of open-source intelligent hardware and software into e-textiles for enhancement of the intuitive function and value via economy of labor.

Design and Cultural Aspects of 20th Century Chinese Xiangjin Brocade

“…Specifically, landscape painting tends to be fresh and elegant, while flower-and-bird painting tends to be light, soft and dark. Therefore, Chinese Xiangjin brocade not only needs to inherit and innovate but also needs to integrate traditional tapestry into the contemporary way of life and cultural ideas, just like scholars' exploration of textile innovation and application [32][33][34]. More importantly, it is necessary to construct an innovative practice path for Xiangjin in modern and even future life, because it has important reference value for the modern transformation of contemporary textile art and product design art value.…”

Washability and abrasion resistance of illuminative knitted e-textiles with POFs and silver-coated conductive yarns

“…The illuminative property of POF has the potential to achieve personalised aesthetic features because of the colour changing effect. It could be used in a variety of applications and scenarios that are not limited to fashion, interiors and wearables (Gong et al, 2019;Tan et al, 2021).…”

Woven eTextiles in HCI — a Literature Review

“…Tube structures have been used to insert components (such as solar panels [118] and circuit flaments [57,63], strain-sensing yarns [64], supercapacitors [50], potentiometers [18], and LEDs [5]) and routing wires [20] between the textile layers. They have seen use also for fabricating a twolayer optical-fbre display that changes colour in response to hand gestures [110]. Optical fbres are woven into the tubes' upper layer, and a camera module resides within the tubes for computer-visionbased gesture recognition.…”

“…First of all, precise yarn control enables mutual integration of many types of materials, over a wide spectrum -from traditional textile fbres to versatile functional materials -within the same construction. One can employ the functional materials in various combinations both in warp and in weft [73,87], with their presence ranging from single supplementary yarns [e.g., 5,64] to entire complementary yarn sets [e.g., 32,110]. The ability to construct functional elements for multiple properties by means of a single textile-construction process has been cited as one of the key benefts of weaving in eTextile development [4,27,37,39,43,73,85].…”

“…Moreover, designers can exploit distinct visual cues to support user-interface design. For example, they might denote the location of touch-sensitive elements [96,110].…”