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 to harness visual appearance. We develop a multiscale modelling platform for the predictive rendering of macroscopic objects covered by metasurfaces in realistic settings, and show 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.

纳米结构材料最近已成为一种很有前途的材料外观设计方法。研究主要集中在通过波干涉产生结构颜色，而撇开构成物体视觉外观的其他重要方面，例如镜面反射和漫反射的各自权重，物体宏观形状，照明和观察条件。在这里，我们报告了无序光学超表面利用视觉外观的潜力。我们开发了一个多尺度建模平台，用于在现实环境中预测渲染由超表面覆盖的宏观物体，并展示如何使用纳米级共振和中尺度干扰来对反射光进行光谱和角度整形，从而在宏观尺度上产生不寻常的视觉效果。我们通过肉眼可观察到的宏观物体和厘米级样本的真实合成图像验证了这一特性。这个框架为美术和应用视觉艺术的许多分支开辟了新的视角。