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Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/01/17/nissan_self_healing_iphone_case/

Nissan unveils 'self-healing' iPhone case

Magic auto paint vanquishes scratched shiny-shiny

By Rik Myslewski in San Francisco

Posted in Phones, 17th January 2012 20:43 GMT

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Japanese automaker Nissan's European arm is migrating the company's "pioneering self-healing paint" to the world of pocketable shiny-shiny, introducing an iPhone case that removes its own scratches with nary a buff nor a polish.

"The Scratch Shield iPhone case is a great example of us taking a Nissan automotive technology that has had a huge impact for our customers, and then shifting the boundaries to apply it to another everyday product," said European bizdev honcho Bob Laishley in a statement [1] announcing this world-changing development.

The Scratch Shield paint, used now on the Nissan Murano [2], 370Z [3], X-Trail [4], and Infiniti [5], employs a gel-like polyrotaxane [6] coating on an ABS-plastic [7] case. The coating – in addition to being more grippable than slippery paint, has the ability to grow back into a scratch, thus "healing" the blemish.

Nissan 'self-healing' iPhone case

The Scratch Shield iPhone case protects not only your precious iPhone 4 or 4S, but also itself

The healing process, Nissan says, can take as little as an hour for small scratches, although what it calls "more severe cases" can take up to a week to mend – not unlike human skin.

The European Scratch Shield iPhone case is merely a prototype designed to gauge interest, but Nissan is also working with Japanese telecom giant NTT DoCoMo to add the self-healing tech to that company's Style Series N-03B handsets.

Thanks to the combined work of Nissan, the University of Tokyo, and the Japanese company Advanced Softmaterials [8], one of the banes of modern living – embarrassingly scuffed smartphone cases – has been vanquished.

Ain't materials science wunnerful? ®