Colour-changing ‘smart thread’ turns fantasy into reality

Imagine you are wearing a striped scarf; and its stripes fade one by one indicating the minutes left before the arrival of a bus.

Or you have a shirt with a slogan that updates automatically to match your Facebook status.

Or you have a dress that lets you decide its colour and pattern for the day.

This is no longer fantasy. Researchers from the Berkeley School of Information have developed a new colour-changing “smart thread” that turns fabric into a computerized display. Such smart fabrics can be used to create clothes or other textiles with dynamically changing colours or patterns, it announced on its website.

Some more possibilities apart from the ones mentioned above are a shirt linked to your Tinder profile, that subtly changes colour when you’re near someone you’ve “swiped right” on. Or, a watch woven directly into the cuff of the garment.

This wonderful new computerized fabric technology, called Ebb, has been created in partnership with researchers from Google ATAP’s Project Jacquard.

The project is named Ebb because “the colour change conjured images of the ebb and flow of the tides, rather than the rapid changes of traditional screen based media,” the researchers explain.

The core technology of Ebb consists of conductive threads individually coated with thermochromic paint. When electricity is supplied to the threads, they heat up and gradually change color. For the initial research project, the team used the smart thread to create seven different crocheted and woven fabric swatches.

The team presented their research at the 2016 CHI conference, where the project won a Best Paper award. The annual CHI conference is sponsored by ACM SIGCHI (the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction), Berkley School of information said.

But who would wear clothes that double as a computer display? And why? And how would people respond to computerized clothes? The team explored these questions in in-depth research sessions with seventeen people, including five fashion designers.

Initially, several delegates were skeptical thinking of Ebb as another computer screen. “I don’t want to wear a screen,” said one participant. “There’s enough glare in my life as it is,” said another. The idea made them recall past experiences of light-emitting clothing: “blinking Christmas sweaters, children’s sneakers that lit up when they walked, or light-up visors they might get at carnivals and amusement parks.”

But Ebb isn’t a light-up screen; it’s just that the fabric changes colour. Feeling the fabric samples changed their responses. One participant said that the fabric “seems a lot more tactile and something like cloth rather than plastic.... I think it’s just more intimate and easier to like.”

Thus, participants embraced the subtlety of Ebb’s gradual colour changes. Gemma, one of the participating fashion designers said she “loved the ghostly in and out of thermochromics.” Another participant found the swatches were “more ambient than attention grabbing.” Another thought that “the slowness of the information represented on the display could support a relaxing ‘zen-like’ experience of information.”

Several participants suggested “using Ebb to mystify others, prompting interactions that began with lines such as, ‘Wasn’t your dress blue a minute ago?’ or ‘Wasn’t that stripe on your shoulder before?’ Like an inside joke, this quality of Ebb was seen to bring enjoyment, delight, or a shared sense of ‘being in the know.’ ”

The research team comprised I School Ph.D. student Laura Devendorf, Ph.D. student Noura Howell and Kimiko Byokai, who is an associate professor at the School of Information and Center for New Media. Laura Devendorf, who led the research is an artist, designer, and computer scientist with degrees in both computer science and visual art. Her research explores the challenge of designing machines to support human creativity. Howell researches the materiality of information representation, the design of affective systems, and intimacy and HCI.

The Berkeley researchers teamed up with researchers from Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects group (ATAP), an in-house technology incubator. ATAP’s Project Jacquard is a platform for embedding sensors and feedback devices in fabrics and clothing in ways that seem natural and comfortable. The platform encompasses techniques for creating fashion fabrics with conductive fibres woven into them, plus small, flexible computing components and feedback devices (such as haptics or LEDs), along with software APIs that applications can use to exchange data with the garment.

However, you aren’t likely to find Ebb-based clothes in a store near you anytime soon, the Berkley School of Information said. Although Project Jacquard is exploring a variety of approaches to wearable computing, the current technology isn’t suitable for wide-scale use. Nonetheless, research on Ebb is useful for sparking ideas and uncovering how real people would think and feel about computerized clothes.