Fabricating reflectors for displaying multiple images

Abstract

A great deal of attention has been devoted to the fabrication of reflectors that can display different color images when viewed from different directions not only in industry but also for the arts. Although such reflectors have previously been successfully fabricated, the number of images displayed has been limited to two or they suffer from ghosting artifacts where mixed images appear. Furthermore, the previous methods need special hardware and/or materials to fabricate the reflectors. Thus, those techniques are not suitable for printing reflectors on everyday personal objects made of different materials, such as name cards, letter sheets, envelopes, and plastic cases. To overcome these limitations, we propose a method for fabricating reflectors using a standard ultraviolet printer (UV printer). UV printer can render a specified 2D color pattern on an arbitrary material and by overprinting the printed pattern can be raised, that is, the printed pattern becomes a microstructure having color and height. We propose using these microstructures to formulate a method for designing spatially varying reflections that can display different target images when viewed from different directions. The microstructure is calculated by minimizing an objective function that measures the differences between the intensities of the light reflected from the reflector and that of the target image. We show several fabricated reflectors to demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed method.