Dr. Gavin Miller is the Head of Adobe Research, spoke at Imagination in Action's 'Forging the Future of Business with AI' Summit about Adobe use of AI to create a dress that acts as a canvas to try out fashion styles.
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TechTranscript
00:00 [APPLAUSE]
00:02 Thank you.
00:04 Can you hear me at the back?
00:05 Yes.
00:06 So this morning I gave a session which
00:09 was sort of the big picture of how Adobe's
00:11 thinking about generative AI.
00:13 This afternoon I want to show a particular pet project of mine.
00:16 And if you look at it through the lens of storytelling,
00:19 you might think that if you tell a story long enough,
00:22 eventually the story tells you something.
00:25 And so without further ado, back in 2013,
00:31 I decided to do a vision piece about the future of AI
00:35 and what we thought AI might mean for the future of design.
00:39 And I wanted to make it more exciting than designing
00:42 websites, because everybody assumed that would be rapidly
00:44 changing.
00:45 And my thesis was that if you can design things really
00:49 quickly, then suddenly the fashion cycle
00:51 would shrink from maybe an annual one or a seasonal one
00:55 to maybe a matter of weeks or even minutes.
00:58 And so I came up with a story where
01:00 there are these three virtual agents.
01:02 The one at the back is called CC,
01:03 and she's doing the creative design.
01:05 The one at the front on the left is doing the marketing
01:08 analysis of market segments.
01:10 And the one on the right is coordinating both and then
01:12 acting as the interface to the user.
01:14 So this is a theater troupe we put together
01:16 out of volunteer employees.
01:19 And the story is that the spring collection is almost done,
01:22 and suddenly there's a storm that's
01:24 announced, which is going to completely derail the launch.
01:26 So they scramble to redesign the collection based
01:29 on the designer, who is the single employee of this
01:33 business, redesign it, share it with the designer who's
01:37 sitting in a coffee shop sketching.
01:39 She then tries on the design with a wearable garment,
01:43 which changes electronically.
01:46 So this was a nice metaphor.
01:47 We thought, yeah, maybe one day science fiction.
01:50 So where do you go with this story?
01:52 So in one way, we follow the natural trajectory of Adobe,
01:55 which is to say, what if you could take garments, just
02:01 photographs, and then not only recolor them,
02:04 but then retexture them as well?
02:06 So for this, it's much harder, because you
02:08 have to reverse engineer the coordinates on the fabric
02:11 from a single dress.
02:13 You want to recreate the folds and patterns.
02:16 And so this is great for things like the modern version
02:19 of catalogs, where you have a combinatorial explosion
02:22 of fabrics and things.
02:23 It used to be a very manual process
02:25 to do this reverse engineering.
02:26 Now we can do it automatically with AI.
02:29 So the next one is, well, what if it's not the same garment,
02:33 but you just want to do a virtual try-on, which
02:36 is also a familiar idea?
02:37 So in this case, it's some of our latest work
02:39 on taking the image on the left, having
02:41 a single image of the new garment,
02:43 and then doing virtual try-on and showing
02:46 a realistic-looking person wearing that fabric.
02:49 So this is great for e-commerce.
02:52 But the reason I'm talking to you today
02:53 is that story kept nagging at me.
02:56 And I thought, it's such a nice idea.
02:58 What if we could actually build a dress that did that?
03:01 So I found another intern, brought her on board.
03:05 This is Christine.
03:06 She worked with TJ, who's the head of the Emerging Devices
03:09 Group.
03:09 And they built the dress on the far right.
03:13 It looked fantastically futuristic.
03:15 We tested all the components.
03:16 We put it together, and it didn't work.
03:18 So we kept trying, and we kept trying.
03:21 She became a full-time employee.
03:23 We then did the little swatches in the dress, one to the left.
03:27 And then we did the bag at the front,
03:29 as well as what we call a canvas,
03:30 a flat sheet of the material.
03:32 And then we ended up going for broke
03:35 and doing 1,000 pixels, which feels like 1975.
03:38 But they're really interesting pixels
03:40 because of the form factor.
03:42 So when you put that all together,
03:43 you end up with a dress that has what we call petals.
03:49 You can also think of them as snake scales
03:51 if you're into snakes.
03:53 And they can change between being silver and white.
03:57 And they do this by having a switchable diffuser, which
04:00 is also flexible.
04:01 So it's a relatively soft, lightweight garment.
04:03 There are flexible printed circuit boards
04:05 underneath to keep it thin, because the last thing you
04:07 want to do is make somebody look different size than they are.
04:10 And it's very low power.
04:13 It can run for an hour on a postage stamp size battery
04:17 and all day on a slightly bigger one.
04:20 So this is what it looks like when it's in motion.
04:24 So not only can you download designs
04:26 like you could with e-ink, but it runs at video rates.
04:29 So you can actually make it fully animated.
04:32 It's sunlight visible, unlike LED dresses, which
04:35 would use an enormous amount of power.
04:37 And it's easy to embed sensors in it
04:39 so it can respond to the orientation of the bag,
04:42 in this case, so the graphic always stays pointing north.
04:46 And you can also interact with it using tilts.
04:51 And then you can have multiple objects come together.
04:54 So we showed this at MAX in LA.
04:57 Everybody loved it.
04:58 And then people took me aside and said,
05:00 you might want to work with a real designer.
05:02 And I said, the last dress took two years.
05:04 And they said, great.
05:05 And you've got fashion weeks in two months.
05:08 So we found a designer.
05:10 Oh, well, let me show you the MAX demo first.
05:14 So here is-- under the right lighting, it looks dazzling.
05:17 Under the wrong lighting, it's a much more subtle effect.
05:19 But here you can see the nice dynamics and the fact
05:24 that it can respond.
05:25 In this case, she's moving very carefully in time
05:27 with the movie to make--
05:29 but we have actually got the sensors on board.
05:31 And we even have voice recognition
05:32 to change patterns in response to what you're saying.
05:35 So then we worked with Christian Cowan, who's
05:37 an up-and-coming British designer.
05:40 And you can see here the layered printed circuit boards.
05:44 This is version two of the full dress.
05:47 On the left is the flexible boards.
05:49 And on the right, we're adding--
05:50 is what's underneath.
05:52 It turns out the belt is very important
05:54 to keep the resistances low enough
05:56 to switch all the circuits.
05:57 There are lots of emergent properties
05:59 when you try to do this for real.
06:01 And Christian Cowan loves stars.
06:03 So his whole collection had a kind of emerging star theme.
06:06 So the top half is classical Primrose.
06:08 And the bottom half is stars that are switchable
06:11 using the same technology.
06:12 So it has that sort of design graphic element.
06:15 And then here's the movie that we did.
06:17 Primrose is a wearable canvas for creativity.
06:23 Part of Adobe's research mission is to explore new ideas
06:27 and also to inspire people to think boldly about the future.
06:31 We showed a version of it at MAX last year.
06:34 And now we're working on a new garment
06:35 to show at New York Fashion Week.
06:37 I was just going through videos and was immediately blown away
06:40 by how just awesome it was.
06:42 I kept on DMing it to everyone in my office,
06:44 being like, how do we work with them?
06:46 We need to be the first.
06:48 The Adobe tools, the Adobe Spirit,
06:49 everybody is very collaborative.
06:51 Christian's team, they seem very collaborative.
06:53 So then we were like, OK, we have
06:54 the right people and the right team.
06:56 Let's make history.
06:58 For the dress design, we start with the dress pattern
07:01 that we bring into Adobe Illustrator.
07:02 And then from there, we design all the guidelines
07:05 for where the boards are going to go.
07:07 The top 2/3 has our iconic Adobe Primrose petals.
07:11 And this tells us where all the petals go.
07:13 So let's cut out some petals, shall we?
07:16 If you have something called a switchable diffuser, which
07:19 looks like a piece of frosted glass,
07:21 you could have a material that went
07:23 from looking like white paint to looking like a mirror.
07:27 Each petal is connected to the next one.
07:29 And you send a whole bunch of bits
07:31 through this, which then controls
07:33 whether the petal is getting a certain polarity of AC
07:36 or shorted out to zero.
07:39 Mapping out this dress, we had to be very precise.
07:42 There's a lot hidden within a very small area of fabric.
07:46 Afterwards, we use a lot of After Effects
07:48 to kind of create the content that goes on the dress.
07:50 How do you control specific petals?
07:52 The new software tools we have in simulations
07:55 create different patterns on the garment.
07:57 So let's do--
07:58 Yeah, I want it to feel almost as organic as possible.
08:01 As possible?
08:02 All right, see, that's awesome.
08:04 The last dress took us about three years.
08:06 This one, from concept to completion,
08:08 it's been two months.
08:09 Getting to lead a project of this magnitude at this speed
08:12 has been really exciting, a real opportunity
08:14 to show off what Adobe Research can do
08:16 and what Adobe Tools can do.
08:18 I'm really excited for the future of fashion
08:20 and technology.
08:21 I hope people are just inspired and looking for ways
08:24 to kind of merge the two.
08:26 It's important to just keep on breaking boundaries
08:29 and to keep on pushing yourself.
08:30 What's amazing about the software
08:32 is it allows you to just create endlessly.
08:34 And really, Adobe just allows you to dream.
08:37 It's a science fiction future, but it's
08:39 one that we think we know how to make come true.
08:42 I feel it's necessary to invent the future
08:44 because I'm impatient to see it.
08:48 So that gives you a sense of where we are today, where
08:50 we would like to go next.
08:51 Thank you.
08:52 [APPLAUSE]
08:56 Imagine that you have an outfit that you can wear to the office
08:59 and then when you go to the reception afterwards,
09:01 you can change the fabric or the design to be more playful
09:04 or leave me alone, whichever mood you're in.
09:07 Imagine that as you cross the street,
09:09 it turns into something much more visible
09:10 so you don't get run over and then turns back to the design
09:13 when you get to the other side.
09:16 Everyone would like it to be in color.
09:18 Some people have said, could I design my own patterns?
09:21 And of course, you could.
09:22 So there could be a whole ecosystem
09:24 of aftermarket upgrades and other designers expressing
09:30 themselves independent of the fabric,
09:33 and people could do it themselves.
09:35 And we think this will just be a new form of expression.
09:38 And I can't wait until there's a party full of people wearing
09:41 these garments and swapping patterns
09:43 and going to sporting events and having things that
09:47 respond to the action and so on.
09:49 So the difference when you wear something
09:52 is it becomes part of your identity.
09:54 And I really think that changes.
09:56 Think how much we're bonded to our phones,
09:58 both for good and bad.
10:00 I hope that this will get people to look up
10:03 rather than looking down and also
10:05 to engage with each other.
10:06 And with that, I hope that in some way
10:10 you get to join me in this exciting, plausible future.
10:13 [APPLAUSE]
10:13 Thank you.
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