We’ve just arrived home after a week in Austin, Texas, for SXSW, and what a week it has been. We played 4 fantastic gigs out there to some amazing crowds, so thank you if you were there for one of them. The Welsh gig at the British Music Embassy @ Latitude 30 was possibly the highlight. It was great to play with a handful of some of the best Welsh bands about! We will shortly have some video diaries of the European stint and of SXSW available on Youtube and here. Eyes peeled!

As many of you may know, we entered our AiR Guitar tee-shirt into SXSW’s interactive Accelerator competition. Were were initially lucky enough to make the last 8 out of hundreds of entrants, meaning that we got to take the concept with us for presentation at the Austin Convention Centre. Well, we won an award for it, so we have to thank FauvelKahn for their development and expertise on the project! Thanks to this award we have had TONS of press globally, meaning that thousands upon thousands of people around the world will have been playing AiR Guitar along to CCTV. Bit of a crazy thought, that one.

Read more »

Legions of companies are preparing to show off their music apps and other technologies when the exhibit floor opens at SXSW Interactive on Monday, but already, a handful stand out from the pack. AiR Guitar, one of eight music finalists in the Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator, a months-long app contest with the final judging on Wednesday, makes an unlikely pairing out of air guitar and augmented reality — thus “AiR Guitar.”

To play, you must first don a T-shirt with an image of a guitar on it — or tape a printout of this guitar (.pdf) to your torso. Then fire up playairguitar.com, stand in front of your webcam, and follow the chord symbol from left to right. When it reaches the right side of the stream, strum your air guitar; if you’re on time, it’ll make a sound — sort of like Guitar Hero, except there’s no guitar.

Read more »

Air guitarists everywhere rejoice, you can now make some noise when you strum the air.

Welsh design team Fauvel Khan have found a neat way of marketing up and coming Welsh band The Last Republic. The team have produced an augmented reality T-shirt which features an image of a guitar with an Augmented Reality marker in the middle. Once logged into the Last Republic site you can ‘strum’ along to one of their tracks and win points.

In the spirit of testing things out, Design Wales had a go at the game last week… with mixed results… we were pretty terrible at it until a visitor popped by the office and showed us how it is done… unfortunately for him his score was logged under one of Design Wales’ team… so it seems that Gisele is actually quite a good air guitarist!

Read more »

Two designers from Swansea Metropolitan University have created a T-Shirt that you can play as a guitar.

The t-shirt works by using augmented reality technology. Wearers log onto the air guitar site, their web cam reads the symbol on their t-shirt interoperating every time the symbol on the t-shirt is interrupted as a note.

Inventors Luke Khan and Warren Fauvel are the only entry from Europe shortlisted for an international design award in Austin, Texas.

Jane Solomans met Luke to find out more about how the augmented reality system works.

Read more »

Design company FauvelKhan, founded by Swansea Metropolitan students Luke Khan and Warren Fauvel, is in the running for the Music-Related Technologies accolade at the SXSW Accelerator event in Austin, Texas.
Its entry, the only one from the European Union, is an AiR Guitar, which turns a T-shirt into a playable musical instrument.

The T-shirt has a barcode-type symbol which, when picked up via a webcam, can trigger notes to be played on a computer.

The pair initially developed the idea as a promotional item for South Wales band The Last Republic, but hope it will now prove to be a hit across the music industry.
Mr Khan, an industrial design graduate from Cardiff, said: “It was a surprise to be the only European-based company shortlisted.

Read more »

Warren Fauvel is a Designer, Entrepreneur and co-founder of Play Air Guitar Ltd. creators of the worlds first ‘Augmented Reality’ Guitar T-Shirt.

Born in Winchester in 1984 Warren moved to Wales at the age of 3 and grew up in the Rhondda before completing his formal design training at Swansea Met. University as an Automotive Designer.

Upon leaving university in 2007 Warren caught the entrepreneurial bug and formed FauvelKhan with business partner Luke Khan.

Read more »

Two Cardiff-based designers have won a technology award with their interactive T-shirt for people playing air guitar.

The shirt developed by Warren Fauvel and Luke Khan allows the wearer to score points as their hand passes over a barcode on the shirt.

It won an award at the annual SXSW music and technology festival in Austin, Texas.

The pair are hoping the win will build interest in their product and lead to orders.

They picked up the “bootstrap” award for the most innovation with the least amount of capital.

Read more »