Invisibility

Following a slew of breathy clueless press articles on the announcement this week of a breakthrough in cloaking technology, here’s one that actually manages to explain the details. Technology Review: Emerging Technologies and their Impact.

The key point is that light has to exit the cloaking object (which surrounds the thing you’re trying to hide) exactly on the same path as it enters, and with equal intensity and no phase shifting. That incredibly gimmicky Japanese video from a year or two ago simply projected a video image of the scene onto a coat that acted like a front projection screen. I could do the same thing walking in front of my home projector. To the extent it works, it only works from the point of view of the projector.

But this is different. If these materials deliver as promised, this could actually work. Now, it doesn’t enable a "cloak" as in a flexible surface that lets you hide in the women’s dressing room. The materials so far must be thick (probably heavy) and rigid and would be hard to carry around. But to hide a static object, or something on wheels, it might just do the trick. It seems to me that this stuff would also be incredibly useful in making 3D displays, being able to float virtual 3D images just about wherever we’d want.