Dazzle Camouflague and Disruptive Patterns

Until a couple of years ago, I always had the mental picture of World War I battleships as sleek and grey, like their WW II counterparts. But that's not the case, at least not in the latter part of the war. They were painted in what's known as dazzle camouflage with the hope that it would make it harder for enemy gunners to get a correct range on them.

The wonderful Pulp Librarian on Twitter has a long thread about dazzle camouflage and how it was used in WWI. Unfortunately for photographers everywhere, the advent of radar made it unnecessary and it wasn't used in WW II or later.

Dazzle camouflague is part of a larger field known as disruptive colouration or disruptive patterns. I've recently seen articles about it being used to confuse facial recognition systems and to fool the AI vision systems used in self-driving vehicles.