Ettlin is a German manufacturer of high-tech textile products with several R+D efforts focused on architectural applications, including Ettlin Lux, a line of architectural “embedded” lighting panels and Ettlin Tec, which is exploring conducting textiles with integrated sensing and electronics.

Ettlin Lux capitalizes upon a novel, textile-derived light effect that is similar to a linear spread lens.  They call it a “3D” light effect as it adds a sense of depth and perspective shift to the face of the panels.

These textile concepts have been floating around now for over a decade, but I still believe textiles for luminosity effects or integrated “e-textile” electronics still offer tremendous innovation potential for architectural lighting.  Plus it moves the technology ever-closer to my vision of a flexible, textile-based LED media screen for architectural applications as I developed in my Master’s thesis 20 years ago.