Soft Speakers: Digital Embroidering of DIY Customizable Fabric Actuators

Abstract

Figure 1: Soft Speakers: digitally embroidered audio and haptic actuators on fabrics in three steps: 1) Digital design of the speaker pattern using Adobe Illustrator or Artistic Digitizer Software, 2) Digital fabrication using conductive thread in a digital embroidery machine; 3) Implementation into soft interfaces and wearables

Designing Fashion Technology Garments for Awareness

“…Instead, HCI research focuses mainly on the utility of fashion and technology. One popular line of research in the HCI community is exploring how technology can be interwoven into fabrics to create e-textiles [12,18,23,27,28,31,32,39]. For example, Nabil et al [27] explored the design of embroidering speakers into fabrics for hats, headscarves, and furniture.…”

“…One popular line of research in the HCI community is exploring how technology can be interwoven into fabrics to create e-textiles [12,18,23,27,28,31,32,39]. For example, Nabil et al [27] explored the design of embroidering speakers into fabrics for hats, headscarves, and furniture. HCI researchers have also explored creating garments for various purposes, such as connecting people over a distance [3], visualizing the environment [20], and emotional or physical support [14,24].…”

Learning with Stitch Samplers: Exploring Stitch Samplers as Contextual Instructions for E-textile Tutorials

“…Wearable samplers, where a technique is shown on an example garment (in-situ), is common in usability studies for probing possibilities and getting feedback from potential users. Examples include wearable samplers to demonstrate sensors like touch sensing [52,82], and actuators like soft speakers [67], colour changing textiles [22,32,39], and shape changing textiles [51]. Some e-textile toolkits, like Wearable Bits [47], can move between sampler swatches and wearable samplers by having swatches that can connect to make garments.…”

Functioning E-Textile Sensors for Car Infotainment Applications

“…Advancements in different kinds of e-textile input sensors such as pressure-sensitive textile sensors, conductive threads/fabrics, and advanced fabrication methods make it feasible to fabricate textile capacitive/resistive touchpads [10] and deformable textile sensors [11] to detect surface and deformation gestures efficiently and reliably. As for textile interfaces for output modality, there has been extensive progress on light-emitting textiles, e.g., the integration of inorganic printed LEDs [12], Ultraviolet Organic Light-Emitting Electrochemical Cells (UV OLECs) [13], fabric audio speakers [14] and shape-changing fabrics [15], to embed visual feedback through the textile for in-car interactions. Using these technologies, many in-car interactions are practicable through e-textiles, and we explore some of them in the next section.…”