Structural coloration generates colors by the interaction between incident light and micro- or nano-scale structures. It has received tremendous interest for decades, due to advantages including robustness against bleaching and environmentally friendly properties (compared with conventional pigments and dyes). As a versatile coloration strategy, the tuning of structural colors based on micro- and nanoscale photonic structures has been extensively explored and can enable a broad range of applications including displays, anti-counterfeiting, and coating. However, scholarly research on structural colors has had limited impact on commercial products because of their disadvantages in cost, scalability, and fabrication. In this review, we analyze the key challenges and opportunities in the development of structural colors. We first summarize the fundamental mechanisms and design strategies for structural colors while reviewing the recent progress in realizing dynamic structural coloration. The promising potential applications including optical information processing and displays are also discussed while elucidating the most prominent challenges that prevent them from translating into technologies on the market. Finally, we address the new opportunities that are underexplored by the structural coloration community but can be achieved through multidisciplinary research within the emerging research areas.

Being invisible ad libitum has long captivated the popular imagination, particularly in terms of safeguarding modern high-end instruments from potential threats. Decades ago, the advent of metamaterials and transformation optics sparked considerable interest in invisibility cloaks, which have been mainly demonstrated in ground and waveguide modalities. However, an omnidirectional flying cloak has not been achieved, primarily due to the challenges associated with dynamic synthesis of metasurface dispersion. We demonstrate an autonomous aeroamphibious invisibility cloak that incorporates a suite of perception, decision, and execution modules, capable of maintaining invisibility amidst kaleidoscopic backgrounds and neutralizing external stimuli. The physical breakthrough lies in the spatiotemporal modulation imparted on tunable metasurfaces to sculpt the scattering field in both space and frequency domains. To intelligently control the spatiotemporal metasurfaces, we introduce a stochastic-evolution learning that automatically aligns with the optimal solution through maximum probabilistic inference. In a fully self-driving experiment, we implement this concept on an unmanned drone and showcase adaptive invisibility in three canonical landscapes—sea, land, and air—with a similarity rate of up to 95%. Our work extends the family of invisibility cloaks to flying modality and inspires other research on material discoveries and homeostatic meta-devices.