Okay, so it looks like a special effect from a low budget sci-fi movie, what’s so cool about that? It’s real. See also this video. More here.
(via Making Light.).
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Yeah, it’s cool, but I doubt us mere citizens will ever be able to get our hands on it legally. It’s only going to get more effective as they perfect it over the years, and then it will see some sinister uses.
Um, not if they can sell it commercially for big bucks.
I was about to respond to Twig by saying that this thing has way too many criminal applications to be sold commercially to citizens. Then I remembered that this is the country where a significant chunk of the population thinks selling AK 47 style weaponry would be A-OK, and you can buy professional espionage gear, lockpicks and glass cutters in a store in New York.
I don’t believe it. I mean, the article really doesn’t give anywhere near enough information about how this supposedly works for me to meaningfully compare the story with the images, but *this* in particular shouldn’t be possible if “Professor Tachi’s cloak works by projecting an image onto itself of what is behind the wearer”:
http://projects.star.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/projects/MEDIA/xv/images/bone2.mpg
I did a bit more digging. Okay, so it’s “real” in some sense; it’s just not what the Beeb’s crappy, vague, hyperbolic science reporting makes it sound like. It’s “real” in the same sense in which, if you’re driving a bus that has a camera on the back and a video monitor by the driver’s seat, you have a “rear-view mirror” that makes the back wall of the bus “really” invisible. This “cloak of invisibility” would be great for shoplifting or espionage… as long as nobody notices the camera behind you or the projector in front of you.
Q. Pheever,
I have to admit that I’m more excited by the prospects of how this particular techonology can be deployed (including the use of the camera, the projector, and the “retro-reflective” material) in commercial and aesthetic respects than in the sense of espionage and sci-fi cloak geekery. That’s why the image impresses me: not because it’s an invisibility cloak, but because they managed to make a material that only reflects in one direction and put that material to good use.
In a pamphlet written to help explain how the material works, the inventor of the “optical camouflage” material, Susumu Tachi, details a few uses of the technology that strike me as absolutely grand: making the bottom of a jet’s cockpit “invisible” to help with safer landings, making the back end of a car “invisible” to help with navigation when backing, and (this is from the BBC artcile, not the pamphlet) making walls in buildings that are “transparent” while still being perfectly solid.
An invisibility cloak would be neat, but I’m much more excited by the applications of a technology that successfully projects the “background” onto the “foreground.” Obviously, the technology right now is pretty limited because of constraints placed on the system via the projector and camera, but I have little doubt that those constraints will either be a.) removed, or b.) modified in such a way as to be less of a problem.
I look forward to seeing how this technology is used. Hopefully it won’t be like some of those curiousities from the Victorian era that quickly disappeared.
Fair enough; I certainly agree about the aesthetic coolness. I think I was just having a nasty allergic reaction to the description in the article.
yeah, I saw some photos and video from the early prototype stages. it seems the imaging has improved greatly (the early stuff all the invisible things had a yellowish tinge)
no, I’m sure the invisiblity cloak isn’t too far off. we already have display screens (like your computer) that are paper thin
or rather, we have the tech, no actual uses yet.
we also have the tech for ridiculously small scale cameras.
it’s not too hard to imagine the two being used to form a quasi-invisiblity cloak for a slow moving object.
years off, of course, but hey.
and you probably could sell them to the civilian market, because it’s not like places that actually NEED security wouldn’t be able to guard against it (an invisible person would still light up a 50 dollar IR camera like a christmas tree)
I’m gonna bet that the most common civilian use would be among paintball enthusiasts, for one of their “whip it out to see who spent more money on high-tech equipment, and thus is more masculine” mindgames.
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