At all hours of the day I am plagued by visions of replicated clothing.
For example. You know how you can make holographic chocolate by pouring it into molds with specific groove patterns? A replicator could do that to cloth, by selectively smoothing and thickening individual fibers.
We could design a boiled wool coat with patches that flash in the light like butterfly wings, because the felt has been precisely embossed with those very very tiny ridges. With no hard edge between the matte and shiny areas, just a smooth gradient from flat grey wool to subtle abalone-shell iridescence to vibrant, shifting colors.
But we could do even wilder stuff than this. Let’s go back to holographic chocolate for a second: it’s called holographic, but why? Where’s the hologram? It just looks kind of rainbow-y.
The answer, shockingly, is that we actually can stamp a 3D hologram into chocolate, but the diffraction pattern required to do that is a lot more complicated, so it doesn’t transfer as well. Luckily, we aren’t stamping the design into a surface. We’re materializing it directly.
So we could make a set of fleece footie pajamas etched with a holographic skeleton THAT LOOKS LIKE A SKELETON FROM ALL VIEWING ANGLES. We could make a t-shirt with an entire goddamn aquarium “inside”, with holographic fish that swim around as the viewer moves. We could make wacky eye-melting nonsense, 3D geometries that fold and warp and knot around themselves at the slightest breeze.
All with no electronics, no exotic materials. Just bumps on cloth.
Imagine the fucking rave costumes.
