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3 Responses to “Wow – Invisible Cloak”

1. Scotte says:

   5/27/2006 at 12:24 am

   I doubt we’ll ever see that.

2. Alun Jones says:

   5/30/2006 at 11:07 am

   Trouble is, it’d be a sphere, or a cylinder, and once inside it, you’re in significant dark (if the light flows around you, it can’t reach inside).
   If your eyes are anywhere but the centre of the sphere / cylinder, you see only along the radius
   You’d have no ability to make the cloak whatever shape you needed, and movement would be extremely difficult.
   Great for storing stuff, but not so good for hiding movement.
   And, of course, the materials used would be discrete, rather than continuous, and so the invisibility would be an interesting effect that isn’t quite invisibility.

3. joe says:

   5/31/2006 at 10:18 am

   I would expect this to be more like a form of great camoflauge than pure invisibility. As Alun understands, if you reflect/bend all visible and other near wave length radiation, you will find it difficult to see out. I expect that it will not be completely reflecting/bending but it really doesn’t have to be doing it completely before the eye will see too little to get pattern recognition and blend it into the background. That is how camo works now. It would work well for when you are very still and probably in an area with a varied or completely solid color background with no discernable shapes (otherwise you might see the warping) and probably not so well if moving or in front of something with a pattern that your eye picks up strongly on say in front of a TV or something else where you are expecting certain imagas in a specific way.

   There is another line of experimentation that has been going on in this area for some time with OLED materials. I saw some articles and Discovery channel stuff on that a few years ago.

   joe