Ebb in the Press
Ebb, the color changing thread being developed at UC Berkeley by students and faculty, including BCNM's own Laura Devendorf, Kimiko Ryokai, and Eric Paulos, has been receiving a lot of press!
Andrew Liszekski at Gizmodo featured Ebb on Gizmodo. His article was soon followed by a feature by Christian de Looper on Digital Trends, David Nield on Science Alert, Anna Green on Mental Floss, Futurism, and Engineers Australia!
From the Gizmodo article:
Look around and count the number of screens surrounding you. You’ll probably run out of fingers before you’re done, but why stop there? Researchers at UC Berkeley have come up with a way to weave color-changing threads into fabrics, turning even garments into yet another display.
The team behind this technology, which they call Ebb, developed it to explore how fashion and clothing would change if the wearer could adjust the color whenever they wanted to. Using thermochromatic threads that change their hue when a voltage is applied, a garment could be perfectly color-matched to almost anything—or simply programmed to never be white after Labor Day.
In its current form, the colors of the woven textiles take a long time to slowly fade between hues. That’s why the team is currently focused on the fashion implementations for the technology, because the refresh rate would be impossibly slow as a computer display. But the demo video does show the researchers, led by Laura Devendorf, dabbling in recreating a simple segmented alphanumeric display like you’d find on an alarm clock.
Ebb is a collaboration with Google spinoff Project Jacquard.