NEXT-GENERATION TAG: SNEAKY E-SHIRTS

Clothing with built-in LED displays might be geektastic, but a group of Canadian researchers is taking T-shirt gadgetry to an entirely new level. They've constructed interactive e-textile shirts for an adult game of tag where virtual tokens can jump from one player to another.

Roel Vertegaal, an associate professor in human-computer interaction and director of the Human Media Laboratory at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, led the creation of their game, "TagURIt."

"There have been dresses made with all LEDs and that's cool," he said. "But to be able to actually determine exactly what image is going to be shown on there is even cooler. And that's possible with this technology."

Vertegaal's team used an e-textile made by Philips called Lumalive, which is a 14-by-14 pixel matrix of full-color RGB LEDs woven into a flexible fabric with padding that can be programmed to display images. The pillow-like display technology is usually used for advertising and is sturdy enough to go in the washing machine, Vertegaal said.

"Lumalive is very much non-interactive so we made it interactive," he said. Their design incorporates conductive fabric patches and conductive thread wired to a capacitive touch sensor and a small wearable Bluetooth Arduino computer. A small radio circuit measures players' positions relative to each other.

Currently the game consists of a chaser and two target players. A target player will have one of two Super Mario Brothers-themed tokens appear on the shirt front, each worth different points. When the chaser is nearly within arm's reach of a player, the token can jump to the other target player's shirt.

"That makes it quite a bit more challenging," Vertegaal said. He compares TagURIt to soccer, where players have the ball temporarily, passing it away when someone from the other team gets close.