Camouflaged cars

Ford have invented a coating that emulates the vampire legends of old by making their cars eternally obscured in photographs.

It’s slightly ironic that a coating which makes the new Ford prototypes stick out like a sore thumb in daylight is the same thing used to disguise them, but their new optical illusion skin achieves just that by using an intricate pattern to deceive our eyes.

 

The layered bricks trick our eyes to hide design features from view

 

You may have seen cars coated with wacky designs on the road before and wondered why. Well, the motive is to hide design features for new models during their road tests, which in the age of Smartphones is now harder than ever. Our current era isn’t the best to work in when secrecy is the goal, but rather than cursing the names of the tech giants Ford have instead developed innovative designs such as the new 3D “Brick” camouflage, which is helping to counteract over-eager snappers.

The coating was inspired in-part by popular optical illusions and works by creating the impression of shapes and shadows that disguise delicate design features. By overlapping the shaded bricks thousands of times in different orientations, our minds are fooled into seeing 3D textures where there are none. So now both customers and rivals will have to wait until Ford’s chooses to reveal the new models in all their glory.

 

The intricate design features are concealed by the new coating as our eyes can only discern the basic shape

 

See the coating in action here.

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