LightCloth: The Future Of Fashion Is Optic Fiber Interactive Cloth

The fashion industry is an ever changing industry with trends that sometimes go beyond our understanding. With fashion, we always try to push the boundaries of what is possible, and we’re seeing more of that lately with all the new wearable technologies being announced and rolled out. New materials and patterns are always being introduced, so it should come as no surprise that there will soon be clothes made out of interactive cloth made from optic fibers.

The concept is injected into our minds by a collaboration between several Universities (JST, Meiji University, Keio University and The University Of Tokyo) and could fundamentally change the way our clothes look and feel. Their first prototype is an optic fiber woven canvas that can display basically an unlimited amount of colors.

The LightCloth, (as the material is dubbed), was developed when discovering the light-emitting fabric, where light is emitted from the optical fiber surface. This feature is the basic foundation of the LightCloth and gives it the property of becoming an interactive cloth. This means that with the help of some ingenuity, cloth can be interacted with in order to change colors of the so far, single-path strands.

However, in the future, the team behind this new interactive cloth wants to weave a more advanced LightCloth material that has light emitting strands of cloth going in two directions, which will make it both higher in resolution, as well as more interactive. For now, by using a data pen, the user can choose and change the color of any strand of the optic fibers woven into the LightCloth fabric. This means that you could basically change the color of your clothes into any pattern or color you want.

Even though the material is thin, it could still become thinner with the help of some refining in the technology behind it. Ultimately, it would become one of the most durable and interactive cloth fabrics on the market, and one that could drive fashion beyond the wearable technology that we are accustomed to seeing today.