SonUmbra & Solar Harvesting Textiles

this week I'm away from home, and have been sick. it's thursday and the first day my head's felt clear in ages. after a week of early night's sleep with nighttime cold'n'flu tablets I'm finally catching up on some class work.

tonight I came across these projects:

• loop.pH design studio's project "SonUmbra" - experiments in responsive textile architecture.
  "SonUmbra is a solar-powered tree composed of strands of light-emitting fabric woven into a lucent web of branches. The installation’s canopy of photovoltaic panels captures light during the day, and once the sun sets the tree blooms in an interactive flourish of light and sound."
  this looks great - it seems like they're using fibre obtic cables? I have to research this some more. their photos on flickr show some of the projects and installation.
  image via C-Monster<> at www.flickr.com/photos/23835356@N00/2297218390
• Solar Harvesting Textiles - a project by Sheila Kennedy that I came across via this article on their Soft House. according to the article, Kennedy hopes that "textiles will soon be able to take the sun’s energy and turn it into electricity". . . ."The Soft House is a structure that can create close to 16,000 watt-hours of electricity by transforming household curtains into flexible, semi-transparent, solar collectors.". whilst this system is too expensive to use practically now, with Moore's Law it won't be long before these sort of fabrics will be in regular use.
  image via http://assets.inhabitat.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/softpv2.jpg & soft house article on Inhabitat site