How can you make a fake look and feel as good as the real thing? That is the task facing researchers at the UK鈥檚 National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, who are leading a European effort to determine what characteristics are most important to how realistic a fake material seems.
Synthetic versions of materials such as wood, silk and leather can reduce the consumption of natural resources and can be engineered to last longer. But over half such products fail to take off because people find them unnatural and unattractive. So now the NPL team is using surface analysis techniques and functional MRI to determine precisely which aspects of reflectivity and roughness are important to getting the look.
To measure the way materials reflect different wavelengths of light, the team will use an 鈥渋mage replicating imaging spectrometer鈥� (IRIS). This device, developed by Andy Harvey at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, UK, and adapted by the NPL team, captures the light reflected by a surface and then separates it into constituent wavelengths. It then takes eight separate images of the surface at different wavelengths to create a profile of the reflected light.
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The researchers are also developing an artificial fingertip to measure a material鈥檚 texture and friction. The finger consists of a force sensor embedded within a 鈥渟kin鈥� of flexible material. Information from both devices will be combined to create detailed descriptions of the look and feel of natural materials and various fake versions of each.
For the next step, researchers at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland will use functional MRI scans of volunteers to see which areas of the brain respond as the subjects handle natural materials and different fakes. By seeing which fakes produce a response closest to the real thing, they will be able to deduce which properties are key to likeness.
