clothing that can change pigmentation with a remote, using a similar technique to that of a chameleon. probably would be dry clean only.-- Malakh, May 12 2000 semi-invisibility suit semi-invisibility_20suitconvergent annotations... [egnor, May 12 2000, last modified Oct 17 2004] wasnt there a fad of hypercolor clothing that changed color with temperature? i dont know if that was the name, but i remember these things.-- rhino, May 13 2000 <grin> Yeah, and what happened to them is every woman's breasts and groin lit up, since the lower body has a fairly large blood supply, and the breasts were the high points of the shirt...They flopped pretty quickly. <The shirts I mean, not the breasts.> Besides, the commercials always showed other people putting their hands on the stuff to make it change color. 'Buy this clothing and strangers will fondle you!'-- StarChaser, May 13 2000 Actually for years and years I wanted to make a coat that was made of fiber-optic cable. each "pixel" on the coat would have the other end at the appropriate place on the other side of your body.
I figured that no it wouldn't be perfect but the kind of wobble/shimmer effect would look cool even if it didn't mask you. :-)-- tzanger, Jun 27 2000 Oooooo...I'd LOVE one of those...-- StarChaser, Jun 27 2000 Well, you would have to put special lenses on both ends of the fibers. If you just ran cable with cut ends, the width of the cable is equal to the surface area of the opening. Enough cable to cover the front of your body would be as thick as your body! You would have no room inside! If you used some kind of plastic lenses, you could do it, but image quality would probably suffer. It would still show stuff though, just a little blocky and lower resolution. Think of MPEG video files ;-)-- lockle, Aug 15 2000 kukamungafungabunga!-- djmills, Dec 13 2000 anybody read McCaffrey's Coelura?-- Urania, Jan 03 2001 This is a lovely idea, as we say in Britain. I would suggest a black coat with a white front. When you press the remote, the front becomes black. This could be done with existing technology.-- Vance, Jan 29 2001 A while ago, I think it was popular science magazine that published an article about plastic signs with a special kind of dye that could be controlled electronically. Maybe you could use the same technique. The signs were made of thin looking plastic, and they didn't need any current to maintain the image, if I remember correctly.-- dangerousdan, Feb 16 2002 This sort of thing is now quite feasible. We now have bendable colour LCD screens and LCD type screens where the pixel stays the same colour until you change it.
Integrating the 2 technologies is possible but unfeasable at the moment because: 1)The garments would be very stiff. 2)The garments would be VERY expensive. 3)The garments would be quite fragile. Give it 5 years and these will be on the market though. There would be many uses for this: 1)Advertising - Man covered in adverts 2)Saftey - Flashing yellow man would be hard to miss 3)Signelling... imaging aircraft guidemen whos cloths told the planes which direction to go. 4)Military Use Camoflage that will hide a man anywhere... jungle, city a beach etc. Theaoritically I would expect to see this stuff strapped to a tank pretty soon....!-- CasaLoco, Feb 16 2002 dan - I think what you're talking about is this thing with magnetically polarised plastic balls suspended in oil between 2 sheets of plastic. One half of each ball would be white and the other black, they could be flipped with a magnetic field. It started as an idea to create a 'paperless office'.-- chud, Mar 16 2002 Wow, I had this idea just now, and was not surprised to see it already on the HB.
What is remarkable is how rapidly technologies like digital paper come to reality.-- csea, May 28 2011 and actually they are starting to use the stuff on paint and static building, thing of a LED tv that only shined in IR to mask infra red guided bombs or make a tank look like a bus or car (to the low res IR bombs)
I don't think anyone has made an e-ink with a flexible substrate yet? but I don't see why it wouldn't be possible.-- metarinka, May 29 2011 Wouldn't it be possible to do something with trained chameleons, and cut out the middle-man as it were...-- not_morrison_rm, May 30 2011 random, halfbakery