Adobe Previews Dress Design You Can Change on a Dime
Adobe just previewed a technology that could make getting dressed much more interactive — and interesting.
The San Jose-based software giant showed off what it calls Project Primrose as part of the “Sneaks” portion of Adobe Max 2023 creative conference, which took place in Los Angeles last week. Christine Dierk, a research scientist at Adobe, took the stage in a dress that changed patterns and colors with the click of the button — and perhaps more notably, allowed for animated patterns to dance across the dress while Dierk wore it.
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“Fashion doesn’t have to be static; it can be dynamic and even interactive. Furthermore, the role of designers doesn’t have to end once a product has shipped. With reconfigurable apparel, consumers could download new designs for clothes already in their closets,” Dierk said.
Adobe used material that can commonly be found in smart window applications to build the textile displays on Dierk’s dress. The material, called reflective-backed polymer-dispersed liquid crystal, or PDLC, can be cut into any size or shape, according to a 2022 research paper by Dierk and her Adobe colleagues, TJ Rhodes and Gavin Miller.
“If you’ve ever seen a window where someone presses a button and it goes from transparent to opaque, that’s the material we’re using. We laser-cut this material into small display elements that we call ‘petals’ and have applied a reflective backing. This allows the material to transition between opaque (appearing ivory) and reflective (appearing dark gray),” Dierk told Sourcing Journal. “We use pulse width modulation (PWM) to achieve grayscale states. We’ve designed custom drive circuitry in the form of flexible PCBs (printed circuit boards). The petals attach to these PCBs, which are sewn to the garment.”
According to Dierk, the resulting textile displays are non-emissive, meaning that they are viewable in bright lighting conditions and require less power than other displays, like LEDs. The technology allows users to display designs created in four of Adobe’s software tools — After Effects, Illustrator, Stock and Firefly — on the petals, offering them a new creative canvas.
“Primrose content can be created in various Adobe tools as long as the aspect ratio matches that of the dress, and it can be exported as a PNG sequence. We’ve implemented a software pipeline that converts PNG sequences into a framebuffer that can be played back on the dress,” Dierk explained. “Content is uploaded to the dress using a microSD card; however, future implementations could leverage WiFi or Bluetooth to enable new designs to be uploaded directly from a mobile device.”
Project Primrose resulted from a number of experiments and years of work prior to its preview, Miller, who serves as vice president, Adobe research, said.
“TJ Rhodes, a researcher at Adobe, and I were making a display using a switchable diffuser, called Project Glasswing. I had previously observed that putting a piece of tracing paper on a mirror makes a matte white appearance. Using a flexible switchable diffuser on a reflective backing was how to make switchable scales — or what we now call petals,” Miller said.
Years of research and “a series of prototypes” eventually yielded a “thin, flexible way to power and drive the petals and have them conform to the dress design,” Miller continued. “Christine made an inspiring set of physical prototypes before we had the final design for the dress. Meanwhile, TJ had been working on a series of flat panels to iron out the electronics. In practice we all worked on the software and TJ drove the electronic design incorporating some ideas from me, with TJ also finding the right technologies and processes to make the dress robust and elegant.”
Though Adobe users could soon have a brand-new canvas, interactive fashion garment aren’t brand new, though they have yet to go mainstream. In 2016, IBM Watson and luxury label Marchesa teamed up to debut a dress that changed color based on sentiments expressed on social media. And E Ink, the epaper firm whose technology powers the Amazon Kindle device, has, in past years, created dresses and fashion garment that can change colors and patterns with a current applied to them.
Dierk said she and her colleagues at Adobe kept sustainability and creativity in mind as they worked on Project Primrose.
“Rather than buying a new garment for every event or recycling styles at the end of a season, consumers could simply download new designs to refresh their look. Fashion has always been a place for folks to express their creativity in novel and playful ways, and we hope that Primrose encourages creative exploration. Primrose can also enable new levels of customization. Rather than simply wearing a garment off the rack, consumers can upload custom designs and really make the garment their own,” she said.
Project Primrose has not been launched publicly, and the dress Dierk wore at MAX was simply a prototype, a spokesperson for Adobe said.
