This iridescent squid-ink jacket turns 500 million years of evolution into fashion!

Mimicking the squid’s color-shifting properties, brought about by years upon years of evolution, VolleBak’s Squid Ink jacket too has the power to transform in color with relation to its light source. Designed with a pigment that comprises as many as 2 billion disruptively-structured microscopic glass spheres, Vollebak’s iridescent jacket isn’t for camouflage… it’s for standing out. Under dim, dull light conditions, the jacket appears dull and black, but in the presence of a harsh light, the jacket shimmers up with colors across the spectrum, looking quite like the color separation you’d see on a bubble, or a puddle of petroleum in the sun.

Like all of VolleBak’s jackets, the Squid Ink jacket is a solid piece of apparel, designed perfectly for its use case. Made to be a great skiing and snowboarding jacket, the product is waterproof and wind-resistant, keeping you dry and toasty inside while it’s snowing or raining out. While the jacket is a great, functional piece of clothing, its highlight (like VolleBak’s Solar Charged Jacket), is its incredible material-engineering. Designed to mimic the camouflaging properties of a squid’s skin (which allows it to hide from its prey), the jacket reverses the use case, by relying on reflective spheres to actually increase visibility, making you almost glow in your surroundings, with a mesmeric rainbow of shimmering colors! Is it also a coincidence that we’re in Pride Month?? Maybe not!

Designer: VolleBak

Qualcomm axes its own Mirasol production, will only bring some devices to market itself

Shanda Bambook with Qualcomm Mirasol display

Talk about flying under the radar. While everyone's focus on Qualcomm's results last week centered on the mobile chip business going gangbusters, the company quietly revealed during its fiscal results call that it's backing out of producing Mirasol displays itself. CEO Paul Jacobs instead wants the company licensing out the butterfly-inspired screens to interested companies and will limit its direct commercialization to "certain" devices. The company isn't explaining why beyond the plan more closely matching "addressable opportunities," although the absence of any widescale launches (and unconfirmed but repeated talk of low yields at The Digital Reader) suggests that factory output never quite reached critical mass. We're hoping that someone picks up the color e-reader torch before too long and delivers more than just the reference model derivatives we've seen to date.

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Qualcomm axes its own Mirasol production, will only bring some devices to market itself originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 23 Jul 2012 13:38:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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