Insights from nature: Optical biomimetics

This paper reviews some examples of structural colour in nature, and examples in which these structures have served as a direct inspiration for technological applications, for example, in display technology or optical security. In other cases, biological structures suggest a new perspective on optical design. In this paper, we explore two examples of this approach. In one case we examine the role of an evolutionary constraint (low refractive index contrasts), and in the other the need to satisfy several different design objectives simultaneously.