trading-off different factors, including colour, contrast and overall disruptive effect. A failure to consider all elements of pattern design tends to result in poor results. The US Army's Universal Camouflage Pattern (UCP), for example, adopted after limited testing in 2003–4, performed poorly because of low pattern contrast ("isoluminance"—beyond very close range, the design looks like a field of solid light grey, failing to disrupt an object's outlines) and arbitrary colour selection, neither of which could be saved by quantizing (digitizing) the pattern geometry. The design was replaced from 2015 with Operational Camouflage Pattern, a non-pixellated pattern. History Interwar development in Europe The idea of patterned camouflage extends back to the interwar period in Europe. The first printed camouflage pattern was the 1929 Italian telo mimetico, which used irregular areas of three colours at a single scale. German WWII experiments During the Second World War, Johann Georg Otto Schick designed a series of patterns such as Platanenmuster (plane tree pattern) and Erbsenmuster (pea-dot pattern) for the Waffen-SS, combining micro- and macro-patterns in one scheme. The German Army developed the idea further in the 1970s into Flecktarn, which combines smaller shapes with dithering; this softens the edges of the large scale pattern, making the underlying objects harder to discern. Soviet WWII experiments Pixel-like shapes pre-date computer-aided design by many years, already being used in Soviet Union experiments with camouflage patterns, such as "TTsMKK" developed in 1944 or 1945. The pattern uses areas of olive green, sand, and black running together in broken patches at a range of scales. 1976 research by Timothy O'Neill In 1976, Timothy O'Neill created a pixellated pattern named "Dual-Tex". He called the digital approach "texture match". The initial work was done by hand on a retired M113 armoured personnel carrier; O'Neill painted the pattern on with a 2-inch (5 centimetres) roller, forming squares of colour by hand. Field testing showed that the result was good compared to the U. S. Army's existing camouflage patterns, and O'Neill went on to become an instructor and camouflage researcher at West Point military academy. 2000s fractal-like digital patterns By 2000, development was underway to create pixellated camouflage patterns for battledress like the Canadian Forces' CADPAT, that was developed in 1997 which later was issued in 2002, and then the US Marines' MARPAT, rolled out between 2002 and 2004. The CADPAT and MARPAT patterns were somewhat self-similar (in the manner of fractals and