It was about time, wasn’t it? We are almost into 2014 and the world has cried out for a pillow or piece of clothing which changes colour for quite some time now.
Well, cry out no more. The Meiji University in Japan is the home of the new LightCloth. A group of researchers there have managed to come up with a fabric which changes colour on demand.
It is woven from a number of fibre option lines which allow the furnishing and clothing items which use it to – gasp! – change colour.
Change Colour with a Pen or Laser Pointer
Sunao Hashimoto is an associate professor in the university and he explained that while the fabric is very thin it can emit full colour lighting. Every one of the strands has a different colour and you can use a special pen to change the colour.
Basically, each of the fibre optic strands in the material works as both an output for the light patterns which are produced on the material as an input source when used with a stylus. As well as the pen it could be controlled with a laser pointer.
The fact that the material could be used in clothes means that you could use laser pointer to change the colour of the clothes being worn by people on a stage, for example. The next phase of work which the researchers are going to carry out is that of making it two dimensional. There is even talk of it being able to change colour automatically depending upon your mood in the future.
What uses could you find for a material which changes colour like this?
