Structural coloration has attracted great interest from scientists and engineers in recent years, owing to fascination with various brilliant examples displayed in nature as well as to promising applications of bio-inspired functional photonic structures and materials. Much research has been done to reveal and emulate the physical mechanisms that underlie the structural colors found in nature. In this article, we review the fundamental physics of many natural structural colors displayed by living organisms as well as their bio-inspired artificial counterparts, with emphasis on their connections, tunability strategies, and proposed applications, which aim to maximize the technological benefits one could derive from these photonic nanostructures. WIREs Nanomed Nanobiotechnol 2016, 8:758-775. doi: 10.1002/wnan.1396 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

Accommodative depth cues, a wide field of view, and ever-higher resolutions all present major hardware design challenges for near-eye displays. Optimizing a design to overcome one of these challenges typically leads to a trade-off in the others. We tackle this problem by introducing an all-in-one solution - a new wide field of view, gaze-tracked near-eye display for augmented reality applications. The key component of our solution is the use of a single see-through, varifocal deformable membrane mirror for each eye reflecting a display. They are controlled by airtight cavities and change the effective focal power to present a virtual image at a target depth plane which is determined by the gaze tracker. The benefits of using the membranes include wide field of view (100° diagonal) and fast depth switching (from 20 cm to infinity within 300 ms). Our subjective experiment verifies the prototype and demonstrates its potential benefits for near-eye see-through displays.

Shape memory polymers (SMPs) have been shown to accurately replicate photonic structures that produce tunable optical responses, but in practice, these responses are limited by the irreversibility of conventional shape memory processes. Here, we report the intensity modulation of a diffraction grating utilizing two-way reversible shape changes. Reversible shifting of the grating height was accomplished through partial melting and recrystallization of semicrystalline poly(octylene adipate). The concurrent variations of the grating shape and diffraction intensity were monitored via atomic force microscopy and first order diffraction measurements, respectively. A maximum reversibility of the diffraction intensity of 36% was repeatable over multiple cycles. To that end, the reversible shape memory process is shown to broaden the functionality of SMP-based optical devices.