Color-Changing Fabrics
While parts of the fashion world obsess over an ever-changing parade of “This Season’s Hottest Color,” a small group of pioneers are perfecting the means to rewrite the spectrum entirely. A far cry from the gimmicky heat-sensitive Hypercolor T-shirts of the ’90s, modern advances in photochromatic technology are throwing up some intriguing possibilities for the way we dress, and how our clothes themselves react to our environment.
What’s most exciting about modern color-changing technology is that it’s progressing from a number of different directions, each one built on entirely different scientific principles. The first, currently being explored by scientists at the University of Michigan, involves a membrane of tiny crystals that react differently when exposed to various wavelengths of light. As the light shines on a wafer thin sheet of indium tin oxide, a charge is created that causes the crystals to change their formation, affecting the fabric’s color and outward appearance. The U.S. military has already expressed interest in using this technology to develop active camouflage (much like that of a chameleon), but scientists working on the project have given no reason why it couldn’t be adapted for the consumer marketplace as well.
Over at Concordia University in Montreal, however, there’s another approach being trialled altogether. As part of a project dubbed “Karma Chameleon,” scientists are investigating a way to harness electricity from the movement of the human body and use it to power a new kind of “electronic fabric.” Using a very subtle current, the material would trigger super-fine wires woven into its makeup to change its color or illuminate according to the wearer’s actions. Beyond that, the hope is to develop a fabric that can charge itself via the body and store energy independently, using it to completely change in appearance at the wearer’s discretion.
source: internet
