In nature, two of the most highly adaptable creatures are the octopus and cuttlefish.

Both sea creatures are able to adapt to their environment by changing their skin color to blend into their surroundings.

With this concept of camouflage in mind, scientists at the Rogers Research Group are hoping to replicate these features by creating a synthetic material that will allow soldiers to have the ability to be indiscernible and almost invisible during combat.

Like Us on Facebook

Led by John Rogers, head of materials research group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the team of researchers has created a material made up of very thin dye layers stacked atop of each other. These layers are then divided into pixels.

Although the dye in the material is dark, it becomes transparent when there is a change in temperature.

Under the dye, there's a layer of reflective silver and below the silver is a layer of heating diodes. The technology relies on a photodetectors that run throughout the synthetic material.

When light hits the material, photodetectors send signals to the diodes, which consequently heats the dye, making it lighter and transparent. Because of this change, the pixels are able to blend in with the hue patterns they are surrounded by. This makes the material look transparent.

The sheet only shifts from dark to white at the moment, but Rogers and his team are hoping that they'll eventually be able to develop a way for the material to shift to other colors.

Although the technology shows much promise, Rogers admits there's still much work to be done on it. It's still at its very early stages.

"It's nothing close to being ready to deploy, in a military setting or anything else. It's really a beginning point, to focus on the engineering science around how you might create systems that have this type of function," he said.