Adobe's Christine Dierk Becomes the Canvas with a Wearable Display Dress Based on Project Primrose

Adobe researcher Christine Dierk has taken to the catwalk at the company's MAX conference wearing a dress with a difference: based on her Project Primrose technology, it acts as a digital display capable of changing its appearance with the push of a button.

"Creatives are always looking for new canvases to play with, and fashion has always been a place where consumers and designers alike can express their creativity," Dierk explains during her MAX presentation. "Many fashion designers use Adobe tools throughout their design process, and in Illustrator iterating is easy: trying out a new design can be as simple as clicking a button. Wouldn't it be amazing if the garments themselves could be reconfigured just as easily?"

That is the idea behind Project Primrose, a technology first presented by Dierk and fellow Adobe researchers TJ Rhodes and Gavin Miller at the 35th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST '22) in October last year: a fabric which uses reflective light-diffuser modules to turn anything into a flexible display.

"Our system leverages reflective-backed polymer-dispersed liquid crystal (PDLC), an electroactive material commonly used in smart window applications," Dierk and colleagues explained in their original work on the project. "This low-power non-emissive material can be cut to any shape, and dynamically diffuses light."

At the time, the Project Primrose technology was relatively bulky and had only been fashioned into two non-wearable displays: a flat canvas and a handbag. At MAX, though, Dierk is showing off the culmination of the team's work since: a wearable off-the-shoulder dress which doubles as a display.

"Unlike traditional clothing, which is static, Primrose allows me to refresh my look in a moment," Dierk explains, demonstrating with a shift from a light-colored garment to a reflective mirrored variant and then to various animated patterns with the literal push of a button — or even hands-free.

"It does have embedded sensors inside of it," Dierk says of the dress, "so I don't always have to press the button. As I kind of turn and move the dress will respond," Dierk continues, switching to a mode in which the dress runs a simple fluid animation responding to its wearer's movement. "My team and I designed every aspect of this dress and I personally stitched it together."

The full Adobe MAX presentation on Project Primrose is reproduced in the video above. More information on the technology and the content authoring pipeline behind it is available in the original Project Primrose paper, published under closed access terms in the Proceedings of the 35th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology; an open-access PDF copy is available on Dierk's personal website.