Invisibility Cloak

Zryn

Interesting!

Nature Communications article

Another cloaking article I read recently (December 2010). That's a bit of a leap in technology for only 2 months.

Huffington Post article



Other articles on this device:

Mail Online

Channel 4

Sydney Morning Herald

Comments?

Nicodemus

Metamaterials are amazing, and being invisible to one wavelength is pretty impressive. To make a material at a small enough scale, and complex enough to block the visual spectrum, seems unlikely; I'd invest in ninja training first. ;)

SpeedOfDark

It's real a Tokyo university found a way to make invisible shirts by bending light, however as a note these things are only invisible from a certain angle.

sciencectn

Here's what I don't get though. Suppose that such a cloak did exist.

Now suppose light were to enter at a spot near your right shoulder and exit out your left. For one, it would have to exit at the EXACT same direction that it entered. Any bending of the fabric would destroy the illusion since the light that was intended to be emitted to the left would go in some random direction. Furthermore, the light somehow has to "know" to traverse a certain distance along the cloak before being emitted off the other side. If you spread your arms out, the light now has to travel a longer distance from the right to the left side, because if it exists at the same spot it did before it wouldn't come out at the correct spot. I don't really see how this is possible for fabrics and flexible materials.

Adaptive camouflage seems a lot more realistic as far as personal cloaking goes.

SpeedOfDark

The British Defense Agency found a much more pragmatic way to make a tank look invisible like I said the fabric that Tokyo university made is only visible from a certain angle, I'm not a scientist so I guess what you said makes sense for why this is true. Also, keep in mind that we can't achieve total Invisibility yet and we're really just achieving the illusion of it right now but the research is just now finally making breakthroughs. All in good time.

nismaratwork

Really? Fiber-optics seem to manage.

Futurama

An older episode of FutureWeapons showed off a cheap version of an 'invisibility cloak' where soldiers whore a thin, LCD film on their clothing with a camera on their back. It worked quite well to be honest.

nismaratwork

Yeah, that was developed for tanks originally I believe; it's the "adaptive camouflage" mentioned by someone earlier.

Futurama

I do not recall watching anything about a tank. However, the episode I saw about the cloak on a soldier was pretty lame to say the least. It was more of a demonstration to a theory than anything. But with better technology of screens that can wrap around objects, this can totally happen.

nismaratwork

Yep, and OLEDs will help, but I didn't see this show, I'm just speaking from prior knowledge of what you're talking about.

edit: Great name btw!

Futurama

Thanks! I'm surprised it wasn't taken!

nismaratwork

Right? Still, good for you, and Welcome to PF.

Pythagorean

SEP fields are the future of invisibility!

nismaratwork

You joke...

I laughed...

BUT....


What if you had a greater understanding of the Nucleus Accumbens, and could influence or disrupt it? That could be a terrible weapon, or defense.