Chromodynamics · 12:01am Nov 1st, 2016
What would a changeling wear for nightmare night? Would they chose to dress up as a scary fanged bug-eyed monster? Or would they prefer a Starswirl the Bearded outfit? Given that their traditional lifestyle involves pretending to be something else in order to extract love from others, maybe they prefer to take the night off and sit back giggling at the amateur antics of costumed fillies and colts extorting candy from the grown-ups.
The ability to change your appearing at will is a pretty awesome super power. With such an skill, it must be tempting to turn into something really creepy to give your neighbors a real scare. Of course, that is not always the best way to make friends. It seems Thorax learned a few things about fashion in the Crystal Empire. The best way to impress ponies is to dress in outrageously bright colors, with shimmering fairy wings, and large glassy eyes. And if you want to set yourself up as the new alpha male, then being a little larger than average, with a pair on antlers on your head helps too. You'll be the model for a new line of toys in no time. Only thing missing is a peacock tail, but maybe that would have been a bit too much.
While no creature in our world can do this sort of magic, let’s take a quick look at those lizard fashionistas—chameleons. Keeping up appearances is very important to this species, which has evolved the power to rapidly change color to send appropriate social signals to their peers, letting other chameleons know whether they want to be friends or not. A little dramatic, perhaps, but impressive nonetheless.
Wearable technology may be a new fad in the human fashion world, but chameleons have had nanotech-enhanced coats for years (although they have not yet evolved Internet-of-Things compatibility—the slowness of the industry to agree on a common standard can’t have helped). They achieve this by a layer of tunable photonic nanocrystals in their skin. Changing the spacing between the crystals, lets them control the wavelength of reflected light. When excited, the crystal separation increases, reflecting longer wavelengths, giving vivid yellows and red. When relaxed, the crystals come closer together to favor green and blue shades. Pigments in the skin then help to moderate the settings.
This is not dissimilar to the physics of the liquid crystal displays, by which you are probably reading this. Other species also use microscopic structured surfaces to give similar visual effects. Peacock feathers and some butterfly wings do this. They can’t change color like chameleons, but they can show a brilliant iridescent color – as the light reflected from multiple layers interferes such that the wavelength changes with the angle with which the light is reflected.
And maybe the crystal ponies know a similar trick?
And then there are octopodes. Between chromatophores and no bones, they do some decent shapeshifting even without magic. Of course, even they can't will hair accessories into existence... though it's not like they have hair to accessorize.
Very impressive, havent seen teh Chameleons before, just the gratings in the butterflies and the nanoyagis for direct down conversion some research group proposed.
Still waiting for the first chromatophore tattoos linked to scavaging microprocessors for in wrist time and notification etc.
It's weird enough that a random genetic mutation occurred at some point to allow this, but when it was new, it was helpful enough (or at least, not bad enough) to get passed on. Evolution is weird.
Skipping your post because I still haven't seen the series finale and it appears to contain spoilers, but speaking of your lead question ...