In the mood to wear multicolored, patterned shoes but only own boring white ones? A special ink out of MIT lets objects change color when exposed to certain kinds of light. The best part? The color swap can easily be reversed, making for endless customization — and, presumably, less waste.

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“Users could personalize their belongings and appearance on a daily basis, without the need to buy the same object multiple times in different colors and styles,” Yuhua Jin, a postdoc from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and lead author on a paper about the “PhotoChromeleon” project, said in a statement.

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To make the ink, the MIT team dissolved photosensitive cyan, magenta, and yellow dyes into a transparent lacquer. Shining a UV light on the dyes brings them to full saturation. […]

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