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Entertainment

AR-Tees: Augmented Reality T-Shirts Have Arrived

Add a little pizazz to the boring old T-shirt. Like perhaps a little streaming video?

Fashion (well, T-shirt fashion) and augmented reality are not exactly strangers. Cassette Playa used the technology to enhance her catwalk show at this year’s London Fashion Week, creating real-life avatars to heighten her already futurist aesthetic. The models wore T-shirts with an embedded digital symbol in the middle, which when viewed through a digital camera, like a webcam, could have virtual text, headgear, and other layers added to it. If you were at our London event, you may have seen Cassette Playa’s demonstration of it there, or you can watch the full video of how it works here.

Now designer Sebastian Merchel has taken this concept and created AR-Tees, a line of augmented reality T-shirts that can transmit video content. AR-Tees uses the FLAR-ToolKit—an open source code library for augmented reality in Flash—to trace the marker on your T-shirt, so when viewed through a webcam it shows augmented content in your browser. Now you can look like you’ve got a TV on your stomach playing old cartoons and realize your dream of becoming a Teletubby. Hoorah.

[via Yanko Design]