Experimental clothing brand Vollebak has created a colour-shifting jacket, which uses embedded black glass spheres to emulate the camouflage qualities of a squid.

The surface of the Black Squid Jacket is made from a resin-coated polyester embedded with more than two billion glass spheres.
Each square centimetre of the jacket is covered with around 40,000 of the minuscule spheres.

In dull light, the jacket is black with a slight metallic sheen, but in sunlight or under flash photography it reflects every colour in the visible spectrum.
This gives it an "iridescent and radiantly bright" exterior that tricks the eye with shape-shifting, liquid patterns that appear to be made using computer graphics.

The effect replicates a squid's ability to change the colour of its skin at high speed, in order to disappear or become hyper-visible in its environment by producing "astonishing optical illusions". On a squid, this is caused by microscopic plate-like structures on the surface of the skin that react to a complex network of nerves, while on the jacket the glass spheres perform this function.

Both use the tiny "disruptively structured" structures on their surface to interfere with light waves, reflecting and scattering all the visible light rather absorbing some wavelengths, to give an iridescent effect.

"The Black Squid Jacket focuses on replicating the elements of squid skin that make it hyper-visible," said Vollebak co-founder, Steve Ti...