In this talk, we introduce computational aspects of softwear, specifically fabric and body-based gestural controllers for realtime, time-based media.

Softwear is part of our approach to wearable computing that leverages the naturalized affordances and the social conditioning that fabrics, furniture and physical architecture already provide to our everyday interaction. We exploit physical plus computational materials and rely on expert craft from experimental performance, music and plastic arts in order to make a new class of personal and collective expressive media. In this talk, I will survey Topological Media Lab research areas including gesture tracking, realtime video synthesis, realtime audio synthesis, and media choreography based on continuous state evolution.