AIVAnet

15

May

New Adobe XD Starter Plan opens user experience design to all

Interested in checking out Adobe XD but don’t want to drop the cash for it? You’re in luck. On Tuesday, May 15, Adobe launched the XD CC Starter Plan, a completely free version of the user experience design app made both for those new to UX design and collaborators in existing projects. The Starter Plan comes with a handful of updates to XD, including enhanced compatibility with Photoshop.

With the free access to XD, Adobe says that more team members will be able to access files without an XD subscription, along with providing early access to students and users new to UX design. The Starter Plan includes access to the top design, prototype, and share features for both Mac and Windows as well as mobile and web. However, it limits the number of prototypes and design specs that can be published for collaboration at one time and includes just 2 GB of storage. Other assets are also limited, such as the font sets.

Khoi Vinh, a principal designer for Adobe XD, said that the XD CC Starter Plan lets users without “designer” in their title to collaborate on team projects in richer ways, allowing marketers, strategists and others in the team to access more than just the project preview shared online. The XD CC Starter Plan is also designed for those that are just toying with the idea of creating an app, Vinh said.

Adobe XD has only been out of beta for about six months, after Adobe spent nearly two years working with the UX design community to create the app. It includes workflow tools designed to streamline the creation process, including a design specs panel that links the fonts, colors, and symbols to apply changes to multiple elements at once.

The full Adobe XD is also getting a handful of updates beginning today. The previously announced compatibility with Sketch and Photoshop CC expands with access to stroke and image effects without leaving XD. The update also adds the option to paste to multiple art boards.

Inside design specs, the tool can now be password protected before sharing the design with other team members. Drag-and-drop symbols will also replace repeating symbols in one move, rather than replacing each symbol individually. The update also includes a number of free UI kits, or asset packs that help designers get started, like a pack with tools for designing a smartwatch app, another focused on travel, and another on cryptocurrency.

During the demonstration of the latest update, Adobe also teased a handful of features that to come later, like timed interactions for tasks like adding on-screen instructions after a period of inactivity and automatic animations. Overlay support, a feature common for tasks such as laying a menu over an existing screen, was also among the sneak peeks.

“UX design is one of the fastest growing segments in design,” Scott Belsky, chief product officer and executive vice president for Creative Cloud at Adobe, said in a statement. “The new Starter plan for Adobe XD supports Adobe’s vision to give everyone — from emerging artists to enterprise brands — everything they need to design and deliver exceptional digital experiences and explore the rapidly expanding field of UX design with no financial commitment.”

The Starter Plan for XD is only the beginning, however — Adobe also announced the Adobe Fund for Design, a $10 million dollar fund that will create grants and equity investments for designers and developers. The fund is designed to help support innovators in the experience design field as well as innovations on creating integrations and plug-ins for adding third-party tools to Adobe XD.

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15

May

With ChroMorphous technology, clothes may soon change color with a tap of a phone

With a simple tap on our smartphone, you’re able to control a lot around us — whether it’s the music playing from your Bluetooth speaker, the Netflix show on your TV, or even your AC unit. But what if you could also use your phone to alter what your clothes looked like? That’s where ChroMorphous technology — an active, user-controlled color-changing fabric — comes in.

Developed by a team of research scientists at The College of Optics and Photonics (known as CREOL) at The University of Central Florida, the new technology allows users to control and switch up the pattern on fabric using a mobile app.

Behind the tech

CREOL claims the technology differs from “color-changing” fabrics currently on the market today. Rather than LED tricks emitting light, the fabric physically changes color because of the fiber itself. Produced in Melbourne, Florida, the fibers are created from raw materials using machines that spin fibers for textiles. After shipping the fibers to the mills, it’s weaved using regular industrial-scale weaving machines and then the fabric is shipped back to the CREOL team. While the fabric is produced with traditional machinery, the machine is hacked to run a micro-wire inside each thread so that running a current raises the local temperature a little bit — which is enough for a thermochromic pigment to switch color. Basically, the pigments embedded in the thread respond to a switch in temperature and then change color.

“When you think of anything you work with on a daily basis, whether it’s how you communicate with people [or] buy stuff, it’s infused with technology … The goal here is to now take fabrics and textiles and garments and say let’s infuse that with technology,” Dr. Ayman Abouraddy, professor of optics and photonics at UFC, told Digital Trends, “I want to be able to communicate with it, I want to tell it how to look, and nothing like that has happened yet. Color-changing is one thing, but our vision is to do much more than that as well.”

Upon first glance, the fabric doesn’t look any different than what you’d see on a regular canvas tote bag or even on shoes. Running our hand along the sample, we couldn’t tell that there was any special technology embedded throughout it other than the battery attached on the side. But we did notice it felt rougher in comparison to fabric such as cotton or polyester, which can play a huge role in whether or not a consumer chooses to buy an item they’ll be wearing. But the team explained it’s due to the larger thread, which makes it feel coarse. Currently, CREOL is working toward producing thinner fibers in order for the material to feel smoother and more flexible. The hope is that consumers eventually won’t be able to tell the difference between the technological fabric and regular fabric currently on the market.

“Even Google tried this, and they went the usual route of weaving a metal wire within clothing. Here, the reason it looks so natural is [because] the wire is inside the fiber, so you never touch it, you never come in contact with it,” Abouraddy explained. While Google may have yet to find a way to incorporate color-changing technology within clothing, the company did recently partner with Levi’s to create a wearable electronic jacket. Currently available for purchase, users can control things like music playback and navigation with simple gestures while wearing the denim jacket.

With a collective background in optical fiber manufacturing technology, the team at CREOL admitted this technology isn’t new but it hasn’t gone further than scientific publications. While CREOL claims ChroMorphous is the first of its kind, fashion designer Julianna Bass incorporated a similar concept into her clothing line in September. Even though it wasn’t controlled through an app, the technology includes thermochromic inks that allow for consumers to trigger a color change via a soft button. It has yet to hit the market.

Sitting down with ChroMorphous

After setting up the app on our iPhone, we were able to watch the fabric switch from a solid color to a pattern by simply tapping on a button. While the interface is still in its infancy, the ChroMorphous team is working to develop an app that gives the user full control over the patterns they can choose. As of right now, the app connects to your phone via Wi-Fi, but there are plans to add Bluetooth in the future. Once incorporated into designers’ products, the researchers hope for consumers to use it the same way they would use a Fitbit or Apple Watch — by purchasing the product, downloading the app, and taking advantage of it.

“We hope that in the future people will assume clothes can do more than just protect [you] from the environment. You assume it can do more – so you put on a garment and then look on your phone and see what is available for it do” Abouraddy said, “We are carrying phones anyway — what happened is they put extra stuff in the phone … a camera so now you don’t have to carry a camera. … We wear clothes anyway, so we’re adding functionality to it.”

After opening the app, we had the option adding solid, stripes, or random. We chose the option to add stripes on the fabric and watched every other strip go from dark green to a lightly colored green instead. But each strip is individually controllable depending on the programming — meaning the team can instead allow users to pick specific strips to change color via the app. With the random option, the colors of the strips will change over time.

Seeing as how the piece of fabric from the demonstration was larger than what you’d see on a handbag or backpack, it did take about 45 seconds to fully switch over to the new pattern. But the switch can be quicker or slower depending on how much juice you have in your battery. If you need the pattern or color to change quickly, then you’ll take more energy out of your battery than you would by allowing it to change at a slower pace.

When watching the tote bag switch from a solid color to stripes, our initial thought was the amount of money we’d save by no longer purchasing more than one of an item we love in multiple colors. While changing the design of the fabric or color doesn’t completely change the look of the bag, it does provide consumers the opportunity to get even more use out of it than they normally would — knowing they’ll be able to incorporate it into more outfits by customizing it. It can also help during those rare, but realistic, occurrences where you’re wearing the same outfit or item as someone else in the room.

The fabric is also washable — as long as you remove the detachable battery and connector, you’ll be good to go. But CREOL does recommend hanging it to dry rather than using the dryer. If there’s any wrinkles, you can iron it with a steam iron as well.

Wearing ChroMorphous technology

We were excited about the prospect of being able to switch up our wardrobe without having to buy more clothing, but it did leave us with one question — where do you place the battery while wearing the fabric? When it comes to a tote bag or backpack, the battery will sit in an inner pouch or pocket. The team wasn’t so sure when it came to a clothing items such as a dress, suggesting that it may sit on the bra strap but expressing that tests need to be done based on comfort. Then there’s also the possibility of wanting an even bigger battery to power a large item quickly. Questions such as these are what will most likely keep ChroMorphous technology from not hitting the consumer market until next year, as the team works to weed out consumer pain points.

“Somebody had to take that step and bridge that gap between these scientific demos and an actual large scale … it’s now a real technology, not a scientific achievement. And our goal … is to have the designers — the actual producers of textile-based products for the market — be aware of it, and [think] of incorporating it into their product” Abourdaddy said.

While the future of ChroMorphous technology is still unclear, CREOL knows one thing is for certain — it’s officially ready for designers to start using it to produce clothing, accessories, and more. The technology is currently scalable at mass-production levels and doesn’t stop at clothing and accessorie — it can also be used for interior design such as furniture and fixed installations.

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15

May

With ChroMorphous technology, clothes may soon change color with a tap of a phone

With a simple tap on our smartphone, you’re able to control a lot around us — whether it’s the music playing from your Bluetooth speaker, the Netflix show on your TV, or even your AC unit. But what if you could also use your phone to alter what your clothes looked like? That’s where ChroMorphous technology — an active, user-controlled color-changing fabric — comes in.

Developed by a team of research scientists at The College of Optics and Photonics (known as CREOL) at The University of Central Florida, the new technology allows users to control and switch up the pattern on fabric using a mobile app.

Behind the tech

CREOL claims the technology differs from “color-changing” fabrics currently on the market today. Rather than LED tricks emitting light, the fabric physically changes color because of the fiber itself. Produced in Melbourne, Florida, the fibers are created from raw materials using machines that spin fibers for textiles. After shipping the fibers to the mills, it’s weaved using regular industrial-scale weaving machines and then the fabric is shipped back to the CREOL team. While the fabric is produced with traditional machinery, the machine is hacked to run a micro-wire inside each thread so that running a current raises the local temperature a little bit — which is enough for a thermochromic pigment to switch color. Basically, the pigments embedded in the thread respond to a switch in temperature and then change color.

“When you think of anything you work with on a daily basis, whether it’s how you communicate with people [or] buy stuff, it’s infused with technology … The goal here is to now take fabrics and textiles and garments and say let’s infuse that with technology,” Dr. Ayman Abouraddy, professor of optics and photonics at UFC, told Digital Trends, “I want to be able to communicate with it, I want to tell it how to look, and nothing like that has happened yet. Color-changing is one thing, but our vision is to do much more than that as well.”

Upon first glance, the fabric doesn’t look any different than what you’d see on a regular canvas tote bag or even on shoes. Running our hand along the sample, we couldn’t tell that there was any special technology embedded throughout it other than the battery attached on the side. But we did notice it felt rougher in comparison to fabric such as cotton or polyester, which can play a huge role in whether or not a consumer chooses to buy an item they’ll be wearing. But the team explained it’s due to the larger thread, which makes it feel coarse. Currently, CREOL is working toward producing thinner fibers in order for the material to feel smoother and more flexible. The hope is that consumers eventually won’t be able to tell the difference between the technological fabric and regular fabric currently on the market.

“Even Google tried this, and they went the usual route of weaving a metal wire within clothing. Here, the reason it looks so natural is [because] the wire is inside the fiber, so you never touch it, you never come in contact with it,” Abouraddy explained. While Google may have yet to find a way to incorporate color-changing technology within clothing, the company did recently partner with Levi’s to create a wearable electronic jacket. Currently available for purchase, users can control things like music playback and navigation with simple gestures while wearing the denim jacket.

With a collective background in optical fiber manufacturing technology, the team at CREOL admitted this technology isn’t new but it hasn’t gone further than scientific publications. While CREOL claims ChroMorphous is the first of its kind, fashion designer Julianna Bass incorporated a similar concept into her clothing line in September. Even though it wasn’t controlled through an app, the technology includes thermochromic inks that allow for consumers to trigger a color change via a soft button. It has yet to hit the market.

Sitting down with ChroMorphous

After setting up the app on our iPhone, we were able to watch the fabric switch from a solid color to a pattern by simply tapping on a button. While the interface is still in its infancy, the ChroMorphous team is working to develop an app that gives the user full control over the patterns they can choose. As of right now, the app connects to your phone via Wi-Fi, but there are plans to add Bluetooth in the future. Once incorporated into designers’ products, the researchers hope for consumers to use it the same way they would use a Fitbit or Apple Watch — by purchasing the product, downloading the app, and taking advantage of it.

“We hope that in the future people will assume clothes can do more than just protect [you] from the environment. You assume it can do more – so you put on a garment and then look on your phone and see what is available for it do” Abouraddy said, “We are carrying phones anyway — what happened is they put extra stuff in the phone … a camera so now you don’t have to carry a camera. … We wear clothes anyway, so we’re adding functionality to it.”

After opening the app, we had the option adding solid, stripes, or random. We chose the option to add stripes on the fabric and watched every other strip go from dark green to a lightly colored green instead. But each strip is individually controllable depending on the programming — meaning the team can instead allow users to pick specific strips to change color via the app. With the random option, the colors of the strips will change over time.

Seeing as how the piece of fabric from the demonstration was larger than what you’d see on a handbag or backpack, it did take about 45 seconds to fully switch over to the new pattern. But the switch can be quicker or slower depending on how much juice you have in your battery. If you need the pattern or color to change quickly, then you’ll take more energy out of your battery than you would by allowing it to change at a slower pace.

When watching the tote bag switch from a solid color to stripes, our initial thought was the amount of money we’d save by no longer purchasing more than one of an item we love in multiple colors. While changing the design of the fabric or color doesn’t completely change the look of the bag, it does provide consumers the opportunity to get even more use out of it than they normally would — knowing they’ll be able to incorporate it into more outfits by customizing it. It can also help during those rare, but realistic, occurrences where you’re wearing the same outfit or item as someone else in the room.

The fabric is also washable — as long as you remove the detachable battery and connector, you’ll be good to go. But CREOL does recommend hanging it to dry rather than using the dryer. If there’s any wrinkles, you can iron it with a steam iron as well.

Wearing ChroMorphous technology

We were excited about the prospect of being able to switch up our wardrobe without having to buy more clothing, but it did leave us with one question — where do you place the battery while wearing the fabric? When it comes to a tote bag or backpack, the battery will sit in an inner pouch or pocket. The team wasn’t so sure when it came to a clothing items such as a dress, suggesting that it may sit on the bra strap but expressing that tests need to be done based on comfort. Then there’s also the possibility of wanting an even bigger battery to power a large item quickly. Questions such as these are what will most likely keep ChroMorphous technology from not hitting the consumer market until next year, as the team works to weed out consumer pain points.

“Somebody had to take that step and bridge that gap between these scientific demos and an actual large scale … it’s now a real technology, not a scientific achievement. And our goal … is to have the designers — the actual producers of textile-based products for the market — be aware of it, and [think] of incorporating it into their product” Abourdaddy said.

While the future of ChroMorphous technology is still unclear, CREOL knows one thing is for certain — it’s officially ready for designers to start using it to produce clothing, accessories, and more. The technology is currently scalable at mass-production levels and doesn’t stop at clothing and accessorie — it can also be used for interior design such as furniture and fixed installations.

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15

May

When you can’t take the studio with you, Alfred AI fixes bad lighting on phone photos

While smartphone cameras are pocketable, professional lighting equipment is not — so one company is looking to artificial intelligence to mimic photographic lighting with just an app. Relonch Alfred is an iOS app that uses machine learning to correct badly lit photos, adjusting each area of the image separately to correct dark, imbalanced snapshots. By creating exposure and color maps, Alfred can correct the lighting using a single slider instead of multiple controls and localized edits, all without requiring a dual lens camera. The app, currently in a demo stage, was officially announced May 15.

Alfred comes from Relonch, the company that created the A.I.-powered camera that edits photos for you. With Alfred, the company’s A.I. editing moves beyond the Relonch camera to smartphones.

Instead of the depth maps created from dual-lens cameras, Alfred creates a color and exposure map of the photo, noting where the lightest and darkest areas of the image are located. That data allows the software to apply localized edits with a single slider adjustment, brightening up the darkest portions of the image while leaving the properly exposed areas of the image untouched.

Alfred, named after photographer Alfred Stieglitz, is based on some of the same A.I. behind the Relonch camera. A 25-member editing team took nearly two years to manually edit 100,000 photos. Those manual adjustments were fed to the machine learning software to teach the program how to create localized adjustments (or edits that are made only to a specific portion of the photo instead of the entire image). Once the program was created, the team also went back and re-edited photos in order to improve the A.I..

The exposure and color maps are the key to how Alfred compares to other photo editing apps. Co-founder and COO Yuriy Motin said that counter to most other apps, Alfred looks at light, rather than using filters, to edit the image. That’s an important difference, he says, because light works to create the mood of the story within a photo.

Editing bad lighting is just the start for the app that’s now only in demo stages. While the light editing feature works off a cloud-based A.I., the team is working on moving the A.I. to the device so photos can be processed locally. The team is also working on a beta version of the software that works on video while it’s being recorded, bringing the same automatic exposure corrections used in still photos to video.

While the app doesn’t require any special kind of camera, Relonch is developing a version that will make use of depth maps on dual-lens smartphones. By mixing the exposure mapping with depth mapping, the software can recreate cinematic lighting effects, such as backlighting or stage lighting. Unlike the Portrait Mode on the iPhone X, Relonch’s A.I. allows the feature to work with any subject, not just people, and applies the lighting effect to the entire scene.

“The key part of our technology is the intelligence of our A.I. that adds drama into each story, filling it with an atmosphere the user originally intended, while keeping the image natural looking,” said Sergey Korzhenevich, Relonch co-founder and CEO. “Imagine a professional photo or video crew where the gaffer holds up light sources to remove shadows and harshness — our technology does all of that behind the scenes.”

Relonch Alfred is currently available on the App Store as a demo version with the ability to edit light on existing photographs. The team plans to add video compatibility over the next few weeks, while the ability to recreate light using depth maps is slated for a fall arrival. The team also plans to release an Android app in the future.

Alfred is currently free, but as the app expands, additional features — such as an option to edit multiple images at once — will roll out as an in-app purchases.

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