How can you make a fake look and feel as good as the real thing? That is the task facing researchers at the UK’s National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, who are leading a European effort to determine what characteristics are most important to how realistic a fake material seems.
Synthetic versions of materials such as wood, silk and leather can reduce the consumption of natural resources and can be engineered to last longer. But over half such products fail to take off because people find them unnatural and unattractive. So now the NPL team is using surface analysis techniques and…
