STOCKHOLM (Web Desk) – A Swedish company – Smart Textiles – has developed a unique musical tablecloth, so you can entertain your dinner guests with your musical prowess.
The one-of-a-kind fabric has a drum kit and piano keys printed on it, which actually produce musical sounds when pressed, the Oddity Central reported.
Li Guo and Mats Johansson, the brains behind the company, explained that making a musical tablecloth is all about using sensors. While Mats is passionate about music, Li has a doctorate in textile sensors and is studying ways to integrate them into garments. So they put their heads together to combine Li’s research and Mat’s ideas, and came up with the innovative tablecloth.
“Since I’m interested in music, we decided to create a musical tablecloth,” Mats said. “We wanted to combine sound and textiles and visualise the possibilities of textile sensors in a fun way.”
According the Mats, the challenge they faced while developing the tablecloth was to successfully integrate soft fabrics with hard electronic components. “The problem today is very much where you get this change from the actual fabric to some kind of electronics, from soft flexible things to the rigid hardware and of course the electricity, the batteries.”
The duo are working on ways to make these components more flexible and light.
So the musical tablecloth, while brilliant, is still a work in progress.
As for their own project, Li believes it will play a major role in the future of textile development, especially in the area of wearable tech. Soon, he believes, there will be clothes that track, gather and transmit data, much better than current wearable devices currently do.
