Axehole

Scientists at Australia’s research agency, CSIRO, have created a t-shirt that could be the future of music – or just inspire a lot of lurid pickup lines.

Engineer Dr Richard Helmer, shown making an onanistic pantomime right, led a team of researchers at CSIRO Textiles and Fibre Technology in creating a wearable instrument shirt (WIS!) that lets users play air guitar simply by moving one arm to pick chords and the other to strum the imaginary instrument’s strings.

“Freedom of movement is a great feature of these textile-based interfaces,” Dr Helmer says.

“Our air guitar consists of a wearable sensor interface embedded in a conventional ’shirt’ which uses custom software to map gestures with audio samples.

“It’s an easy-to-use, virtual instrument that allows real-time music making