Giving Physical Objects Revolutionary Digital Capabilities: Can Your Clothes And Accessories Be “Chameleons”?

Video: What if everything got a new paint job?

Stefanie Mueller believes that new digital technology has some incredible applications in developing changeable color, to make everyday things look flush with vibrant tones.

The idea of being able to make a regular object into a ‘chameleon’ was front and center in Mueller’s talk: the context for this, as she presented, is the idea that companies and innovators can use digital transformations to enhance physical products.

In other words, changing the market from a traditional method, the delivery of physical product, to a new method, the delivery of dynamic and transformable products, will have a lot of interesting applications.

Mueller started out with the example of changing something as complex as the paint job on your car, unveiling a new kind of paint job that is, by any account, pretty transformative.

Mueller presented a series of paints that are programmable – materials that, when applied, change color based on the light directed at them.

“You can simply erase the texture, you apply it, and (you get) a new one,” Mueller said, expanding the idea to other consumer products. “Here you see a phone case, for instance … what if in the morning, you’re not only changing your outfit, but you can also reprogram the (accessories) that you use on a daily basis? Same for your shoes, right? What if you only have one pair of a specific shoe, and then you just apply a new color texture, you download it from an app, you apply it and you’re ready to go … ?”

The same capabilities, she said, can be directed at some kinds of professional services, too.

“You can even imagine this for walls and entire rooms,” she said. “So maybe, if you’re owning an event space and you having a different event, you can simply reprogram the walls to fit your event.”

In some ways, she said, the color scheme used, a cyan-magenta-yellow base, works sort of like an inkjet printer.

Using different absorption spectra and the same sort of model used with RGB LED lights, consumers will be able to micromanage what their possessions look like, using this type of photochromatic dye.

With a series of practical examples, Mueller posited a new kind of market where companies sell the physical product for free, and then sell digital transformations à la carte.

“The idea here is that we are no longer going to sell … T shirts or shoes, or the phone cases, as the main product,” she said. “But instead, you may even get the physical product for free. And … you’re actually paying for an app from that company, where you can download different visual textures and apply them to your objects … Maybe you remember the moments when we were still buying CDs with a single song. Right? … This is the same idea here, extended to our other physical objects.”

Part of future innovation, she said, is in helping these color changes happen more quickly – whereas current methods take about 20 minutes to change, she talked about the potential for doubling the amount of light, which, in principle, doubles the transformation speed.

“Ideally, we would have (transformations happen) as fast as a single mouse click, right?” she said.“It would be instant.”

Mueller also showed grayscale previews and the potential for 3D multicolor programmability with a single substance.

“If you are a product designer,” she added, talking about how some of the extra features might work, “do you just want to quickly try out the texture, or do you want to go for full color and wait a little bit longer?”

In closing, Mueller reviewed some of the fundamental goals involved in this color research.

“The long term vision here, really, is to give those physical objects the same capabilities as we have in digital,” she said, “and … with the videos that I showed in the background, on the technology, I could (hopefully) convince you that this is actually a future that is coming. So I hope in the future we will all get some free stuff, and we would just have an (app) where we can download different textures we can apply, and change our outfits.”

As the TIBCO Career Development Associate Professor in MIT’s EECS department, Stefanie directs the HCI Engineering group and works on the recruitment of young professionals in laboratory programs. Mueller is also a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, with a number of accolades under her belt including Forbes 30 under 30, MIT Technology Review Innovator under 35 (TR35), and a Sloan Fellowship, Microsoft Research Fellowship and NSF CAREER award.