Smart Textiles Research at i10
We've been conducting HCI research on Smart, Interactive, and Electronic Textiles since 2010. We investigate user interfaces, interaction techniques, applications, user acceptance, and design and fabrication tools. We specialize in conducive embroidery, an additive textile manufacturing technique that uses an embroidery machine to stitch conductive yarn into pieces of fabric to realize textile sensors and fabric PCBs. We disseminate our work in the form of paper publications at top-tier HCI conferences, and as student theses, lectures, talks, open-source tools, and live demos at national and international exhibitions. We also conduct related workshops at our FabLab. The two main funding projects have been Inuitex (ended 2016) and 3DCC (ended 2019).
Projects
Smart Glove Maker
An Embroidery-Based Pipeline for Fabricating Smart-Gloves
Page | MSc Thesis | Video | Poster | Tool
Interactive FUrniTURE
Evaluation of Smart Interactive Textile Interfaces for Home Environments
AlphaFabric
A Wearable Textile Sensor for Continuous Touch Tracking and Gestural Input
Pinstripe
Eyes-free continuous input anywhere on interactive clothing
Relevant Links
- Bernina 880 computerized embroidery machine
- Madeira and Amann conductive embroidery yarn suppliers
- Hietk conductive fabric and yarn supplier
- Othe Smart Textile suppliers
- AFP Textilveredelungs- und Vertriebs-GmbH for professional or large-scale conductive embroidery in Aachen, Germany
Publications
- David Garcia Olivares. The Smart-Glove Maker: An Embroidery-Based Pipeline for Fabricating Smart-Gloves. Master's Thesis, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, November 2018.
- Georg Röhl. Interactive Brooches: Physical Interfaces on Smart Textiles. Bachelor's Thesis, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, September 2018.
- Philip Kindermann. Embroidered touchpad sensors. Master's Thesis, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, April 2018.
- Nur Al-huda Hamdan, Simon Voelker and Jan Borchers. Sketch&Stitch: Interactive Embroidery for E-Textiles. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI '18, pages 82:1–82:13, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2018.
- Tania Garcia Velasco. Evaluating User Interaction with a Smart Armchair. Master's Thesis, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, December 2017.
- Philipp Brauner, Julia van Heek, Anne Kathrin Schaar, Martina Ziefle, Nur Al-huda Hamdan, Lukas Ossmann, Florian Heller, Jan Borchers and Others. Towards Accepted Smart Interactive Textiles. In HCI in Business, Government and Organizations. Interacting with Information Systems: 4th International Conference, HCIBGO '17, Springer, May 2017.
- Philipp Brauner, Julia van Heek, Martina Ziefle, Nur Al-huda Hamdan and Jan Borchers. Interactive FUrniTURE – Evaluation of Smart Interactive Textile Interfaces for Home Environments. In Proceedings of the 2017 ISS Conference on Interactive Surfaces and Spaces, ISS '17, ACM, New York, NY, USA, Oct 2017.
- Florian Heller, Lukas Oßmann, Nur Al-huda Hamdan, Philipp Brauner, Julia Van Heek, Klaus Scheulen, Laura Goßen, Rouven Witsch, Christian M"ollering, Thomas Gries, Martina Ziefle and Jan Borchers. Gardeene! Textile Controls for the Home Environment. In MuC '16: Mensch und Computer 2016 – Proceedings, De Gruyter Oldenbourg, Berlin, September 2016.
- Nur Al-huda Hamdan, Jeffrey Blum, Florian Heller, Ravi Kanth Kosuru and Jan Borchers. Grabbing at an Angle: Menu Selection for Fabric Interfaces. In ISWC '16: Proceedings of the 2016 International Symposium on Wearable Computers,September 2016.
- Nur Al-huda Hamdan, Florian Heller, Chat Wacharamanotham, Jan Thar and Jan Borchers. Grabrics: A Foldable Two-Dimensional Textile Input Controller. In Extended Abstracts of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI EA '16, pages 2497–2503,May 2016.
- Christian Schmidt. A Wearable Unistroke Textile Touchpad. Bachelor's Thesis, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, March 2016.
- Florian Heller, Hyun-Young Kriz Lee, Philipp Brauner, Thomas Gries, Martina Ziefle and Jan Borchers. An Intuitive Textile Input Controller. In MuC '15: Mensch und Computer 2015 – Proceedings, pages 263–266, De Gruyter Oldenbourg, Berlin, September 2015.
- Florian Heller, Stefan Ivanov, Chat Wacharamanotham and Jan Borchers. FabriTouch: Exploring Flexible Touch Input on Textiles. In ISWC '14: Proceedings of the 2014 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers, pages 59–62,September 2014.
- Jan Thar. Pinstripe: Integration & Evaluation of a Wearable Linear Input Controller for Everyday Clothing. Bachelor's Thesis, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, February 2013.
- Stefan Ivanov. TextiPad: Implementation and Evaluation of a Wearable Textile Touchpad. Master's Thesis, RWTH Aachen University,September 2012.
- Thorsten Karrer, Moritz Wittenhagen, Leonhard Lichtschlag, Florian Heller and Jan Borchers. Pinstripe: Eyes-free Continuous Input on Interactive Clothing. In CHI '11: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 1313–1322, ACM Press, Vancouver, Canada, May 2011.
- Thorsten Karrer, Moritz Wittenhagen, Florian Heller and Jan Borchers. Pinstripe: Eyes-free Continuous Input Anywhere on Interactive Clothing. In UIST '10: Adjunct proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, pages 429–430,New York, NY, October 2010.