Military camouflage is the use of camouflage by a military force to protect personnel and equipment from observation by enemy forces. In practice, this means applying color and materials to the military equipment of all kinds, including vehicles, ships, aircraft, gun positions and battle dress, either to conceal it from observation (crypsis) or to make it appear as something else (mimicry).

Following is an excerpt from U.S. Army War Department Field Manual - Camouflage of Vehicles (1944) that describes manual ways to camouflage the military vehicles including tanks, trucks and even air craft. Even though things have improved a lot the basic principles of camouflage has remained the same. With help of digital technology invention can take camouflage to the next level using this eco-system or paradigm, where e-ink or similar technology is along with network/cloud-based control via any mobile or wearable app.

The proposed solution is all about a camouflage method, comprising the steps of: providing a programmable display covering a portion of the surface of an object; capturing an image of the view behind said object; and displaying said image on said programmable display, thereby making said object less visible.

There are some research and attempts were made in past in such direction that are reflected in some prior arts like

SCHWARZ (U.S. 20150241176) teach a method for camouflaging vehicles/objects adaptively using sensed background information (Abstract).

But none of them were effective enough and used the digital medium to the optimum level.

In the existing approach, the normal pain and color is used to do the camouflage, which is static and does not change as per the environmental changes or change in terrain. The proposed solution can help immediately to change the pattern design used in seconds using digital paradigm.

The invention we have 3 components:

1. Digital E-ink change the color, pattern or image or text rendering on physical objects dynamically

2. It can do this remotely — using mobile app , wearable apps and specially over a network

3. Specifically, we referring to change the color of the vehicles.

The user on his mobile / smartwatch app selects a color or color with additional text or image /design and connects to the system built into the car which changes the color of the vehicle in real time dynamically and renders the image/text also dynamically using flexible color e-ink paper/displays layers that is pasted to vehicle’s surface instead of standard paint. Being colored e-ink enabled the solution does not require a continuous power supply to hold the color ..and the color is only required only when the user needs to change color or graphics rendered over the vehicle.

There are 2 components of the solution proposed :

1. Flexible color e-ink paper/displays (typically used in digital ebook-readers). can be used where the user sees the color on reflection of light, unlike the TFT/LCD displays.

These have a significantly low power consumption need. Also once the color is rendered it is not required to keep the power on unless the rendered image has to be changed.

This flexible displays are created in pices and are pasted to vehicle’s surface.

Each of these pieces might have a protective scratch resistant layer and some circuit layers below it as shown below:

2. A user interfaces for the user to select the color or upload and input text that can be used to render on E-ink displays /over the car surface.

Typically this can be inbuilt within the car dashboard or can be a mobile or smartwatch app (or the like ).

The user can select his desired color and if required he can type in text and give some formatting.

Additionally the user might specify where on the vehicle that text will appear ..before implementing the user might be able to see that in a preview also if needed.

Improving the idea to provide a workflow that is suited for military scenario and illustrates how the eco-system might work:

Digital surface rendering , US 20170255264 A1 Publication date Sep 7, 2017Inventor: Samir Dash

Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation (IBM)Link: https://www.google.com/patents/US20170255264