  Nanostructured materials have recently emerged as a promising approach for
material appearance design. Research has mainly focused on creating structural
colours by wave interference, leaving aside other important aspects that
constitute the visual appearance of an object, such as the respective weight of
specular and diffuse reflectances, object macroscopic shape, illumination and
viewing conditions. Here, we report the potential of disordered optical
metasurfaces for harnessing visual appearance. We develop a multiscale
modelling platform for the predictive rendering of macroscopic objects covered
by metasurfaces in realistic settings, showing how nanoscale resonances and
mesoscale interferences can be used to spectrally and angularly shape reflected
light and thus create unusual visual effects at the macroscale. We validate
this property with realistic synthetic images of macroscopic objects and
centimetre-scale samples observable with the naked eye. This framework opens
new perspectives in many branches of fine and applied visual arts.

Optics;Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics