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Hi friends,
With the launch of OnePlus 8 series, we’ve been grateful to see our designs once again welcomed by many users and media alike. Today, I’d like to share the behind-the-scenes development of one color variant specifically—Interstellar Glow, a breathtakingly beautiful and futuristic look.
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We shared this story earlier during the keynote: When Ryan, our keynote speaker talked to our photographer about this phone, he said it was the most difficult device he’s ever shot because of the constantly changing color refractions. He said he took about 1,000 photos of the phone, but when he went back to review them, they looked like photos of 1,000 different phones.
How did we capture this whole spectrum of otherworldly light and colors in this thin glass on the back?
Well, we have to begin from the glass itself. When the inner surface of the glass back is especially smooth, as in this case, it’s more difficult to meld a color to it. So, ordinarily, we layer a colored film beneath a thin, colorless glass.
However, with Interstellar Glow, we adopted a brand new “color, material, and finish” (or CMF) approach, one which uses an innovative engineering process to infuse color in both the film and the glass itself at the same time. And by layering the two on top of one another, we were able to produce this unique gradient that gives off a melange of colors when viewed from different angles. And it is an amazingly intricate process:
On the glass alone, we used over 14 processes, including nine optical coatings, to produce its final brilliance. Imagine a prism: the simple glass structure allows light to bend and unravel into a variety of dazzling spectrums and colors. The nine-layer optical coating on the Interstellar Glow has the same effect, allowing the body of the phone to refract and reflect light in mesmerizing ways. This is the dynamic foundation of the OnePlus 8 Interstellar Glow.
On top of this, the optical coating and the thickness of the glass were also engineered using a special process. The back cover is thickest in the bottom-center area, and gradually thins out from there, so that the refraction of light is different across every part of the chassis. Since the more coating processes used on a piece of glass the more vulnerable it becomes, we opted for an OC0 process to greatly enhance the toughness of the glass.
The resulting glass back displays an endless variety of different colors when viewed under different lighting conditions, but we knew that we could take it even further if we matched the glass with different color films.
To make the colors more dynamic and vivid, we applied different processing methods to the coating under the glass. After testing out more than 50 options, we finally landed on a blue-silver film that was polished through nine individual processes. Among those, five optical coatings were applied to the film as well.
Finally, by layering the extensively re-engineered glass and carefully customized color film on top of one another, we were able to create the brilliant, ever-morphing prismatic color schemes displayed in Interstellar Glow.
When viewed under different light and angles, the Interstellar Glow produces a dazzling array of colors, as if it held the entire color spectrum visible to the human eye inside its cover.
On the OnePlus 8 Interstellar Glow we successfully challenged the technical limits of optical coating and the mobile phone industry’s standards of design. At the same time, we also managed to keep the thickness of this back cover glass to a minimum of just 0.77mm, even though it contains 23 layers of precision-crafted glass and film. The whole device is only 8mm thick, and weighs a mere 180g. With its magical color display on top of a slim and slender profile, the OnePlus 8 Interstellar Glow is truly a joy both to the touch and to the eyes.
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