Singapore boffins weave a GUI into fabric, and it's machine washable too

Researchers in Singapore have developed an electronic fabric they claim can be woven into garments to create a new form of graphical user interface (GUI), for people who find retrieving a device from their pocket too much effort.

The development could lead - at some point - to a "future in which clothing functions as a pervasive, multimodal human–computer interface," according to the study published in peer-reviewed science journal Nature this week.

The paper shows someone interacting with computing devices using the sleeve of a wool sweater (no jokes about the Windows ugly sweater please, this is serious). The researchers, led by Singapore National University research engineer Fu Heng, claim this is a big leap forward.

“This fiber-centric approach shifts wearable electronics from flexible panels toward truly textile-native architectures, laying the groundwork for fabrics that visualize, sense, communicate and compute as naturally as the garments they inhabit,” the paper says.

The researchers claim to have developed a scalable process to …