Demo Textile is developed in collaboration with Unit040, Johan van den Acker Textielfabriek and Studio Toer.

Bedtime Stories Demo Textile was developed to open up the concept of Bedtime Stories to wider application areas. While fairy tales and kids led to a very interesting direction, the project team aimed to allow people to think along and to imagine the combination of Augmented Reality on textiles in their context for their use, and not to be limited by the initial fairy tale setting. It is common to use swatches as smaller textile samples in textile industry to give an idea of the proposed product line to the prospective clients. Similarly, software companies offer demo versions of their applications to communicate and to give an understanding of the experience their specific software offers. To be able to communicate to both fields, the project team decided to create a small piece of textile with an application communicating the essence of the project in a context-neutral way. Therefore, the chosen theme was a textile field with digitally growing flowers.

Demo Textile cloth can be used on a surface, but also on a body or wrapped around different objects, etc. Demo Textile is an open-use cloth, therefore, different ideas and concepts can be explored with it. When scanned with the software application on a tablet or smartphone device, the digital flowers appear on top of the red canvas. The flowers can be manipulated by touching the textile. When developing the Demo Textile, the team put considerable effort into fine-tuning the textile pattern to achieve a result where the designers were happy with the aesthetics and the image recognition Augmented Reality application would result in a stable 3D projection of flowers on the textile surface. Getting to know the basics of image recognition software over several design iterations helped the graphic designer to propose a very stable end design – when the cloth was moved, the flowers moved along much more smoothly and more reliably than in previous versions.

Demo Textile is a woven cloth with digital flowers growing from it. The red surface resembles the Brabants bont – the textile pattern originating from Brabant area, where Eindhoven, the hometown of the project, is situated. The flowers represent cultures of the project partners involved at the moment of developing the concept. Three tulips stand for the Dutch and one cornflower for the Estonian involved in the project.

The application is available for Android devices in Google Play as Textales Demo edition.

For further details and the full research rationale behind the work, please see Kristi’s PhD thesis.