By Alex Shipps 

Gemstones like precious opal are beautiful to look at and deceivingly complex. As you look at such gems from different angles, you’ll see a variety of tints glisten, causing you to question what color the rock actually is. It’s iridescent thanks to something called structural color — microscopic structures that reflect light to produce radiant hues.

Now MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) researchers have replicated nature’s brilliance with a new optical system called “MorphoChrome.” MorphoChrome allows users to design and program iridescence onto everyday objects (like a glove, for example), augmenting them with the structurally colored multi-color glimmer reminiscent of many gemstones. You select particular colors from a color wheel in the team’s software program and use their handheld device to “paint” with multi-color light onto holographic film. Then, you apply that painted sheet to 3D-printed objects or flexible substrates such as fashion items, sporting goods, and other personal accessories, using their unique epoxy resin transfer process.

“We wanted to tap into the innate intelligence of nature,” says MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) PhD student and CSAIL researcher Paris Myers SM ’25, who is a lead author on a recent paper presenting MorphoChrome. “In the past, you couldn’t easily synthesize structural color yourself, but using pigments or dyes gave you full creative expression. With our system, you have full creative agency over this new material space, predictably programming iridescent designs in real-time.”