Photo-Chromeleon – Yuhua Jin

In most situations of the real world, once an object is fabricated, the color is permanent and cannot be changed any more. But, have you ever imagined if one day everyone can change the color of the actual object, as long as they wish? Or if one day we can give the color-changing ability to objects, just like the chameleon?

Now, this imagination has come to reality.

During my time working at MIT, I developed a physical color-changing technology and named it “Photo-Chromeleon”. This technology enables users to change the physical color of objects at will, even after fabrication! Explaining it by simple words, it’s a kind of “reprogrammable” dye that can change its color by having special light projected at it. So the color-changing process is really like “light painting”. And the color remains on the object, when removing the light projection and using it in nature environment. If you wish to change the color, you can just use UV light to erase the current colors and re-create newly designed colors onto it by light projection. This process is fully reversible and can be repeated infinitely. A demo video is shown below.

Based on my technology, there may come a day in the future that everyone can personalize their own belongings and appearance on a daily basis, without the need to buy the same object multiple times only for different colors and styles. Until then, everyone could be an artist to design their lifestyles. People can wear color-changing clothes: they can customize whatever colors and patterns on their clothes depending on different occasions. Everyone can live in a dreaming house: they can change the drawing on the wall or on the floor at any time according to their mood. No one will get bogged down in the color choosing when buying new cars: because they can change the color of the car whenever they want, even customize any cool designed drawings on their cars. This technology would be able to revolutionize consumerism.

With this research work, I’ve won the Best Paper Award and the Best Talk Award at UIST 2019, which is the world’s top conference in the field of HCI (human-computer interaction). Until now, my research work has been raising a lot of attention from society. Here are two presses that could help you get some intuitive understanding easily, one is from MIT news, another is from BBC news.

To my mind, it is clear that such technology has great commercial value and research value. However, beyond all of these, I can see this technology has a great value for environmental sustainability. Please imagine if one day, people won’t abandon things according to their color preferences, countless trash will disappear from our world. The meaning behind this invention gives me a very strong willingness to continue it in any case and I will devote myself to improve it until it’s mature for actual use.