There are a few techniques in the world of automotive customization… namely wrapping and paint application. Typically if you desire a matte finish, which is unique to traditional car surfacing, you’d go for an aftermarket wrap. If you want something a little more daring, you can go for paint application.
When you choose the color of a product – a car, a speaker, headphones, a phone case, a laptop, etc. you typically choose something and you stick with it since it’s not dynamic. This is where hyper-shifting pigments come into play.
The pigments are typically tiny pearls of color suspended in a clear coat solution that reflect light in different ways depending on the angle, brightness, etc. So you can have parts of a painted object appear yellow,. and along the sides a shift towards green, and maybe even some areas of blue. There are various effects based on the supported shifting pigment packs one selects. This is pretty great – and many combinations look great. You can’t really control the effect, and it looks better on larger surfacing, but it’s a viable option.. If done correctly, you can pull off some pretty stunning results.
- White to pearlized white (slightly yellow with fine sparkling).
- Black to deep reds or blues.
- Grey to black to purple.
However, I have spoken to the man who works at E-Ink and created the Prism system you may have seen – the color changing BMW. E-Ink is able to produce a film which can support Pantone color-matching across a spectrum of colors.
While it’s expensive at the moment, it’s something that may allow for a great many things besides inclusion on concept cars in Europe. What about a laptop that can change color based on the time of day? Headphones you can color-shift based upon the outfit you’re wearing for the day?
What about bus-stop signage where you can change the headline and color of items? All you need is a bit of sporadic current applied to your design, a short amount of time to perform the shifting, and you’ve deployed dynamic colors and designs.
The film can be segmented and cut into custom shapes. You’;d just need to plan ahead for what you would like to support. And wire the segments up to a controller that would spread out the various supporting voltage to the panels over time.
Maybe we’ll start to see such things developed and tested?
Would you want a phone case or other product that you could change the color of while using an app on the phone itself to select the change?