Toward Color-Tunable "Synthetic Skin"

In OPN's December “Optics in 2015” review of interesting research conducted in the previous year, Li Zhu and colleagues describe their experiments using flexible photonic metastructures to create “synthetic skin” whose color can be tuned to change as it deforms. The video on top shows a synthetic-skin chameleon and the color changes it experiences with a 10 percent strain; the video on the bottom shows similar changes in a flower pattern.