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Inspired perhaps by Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak, scientists have recently developed several ways—some simple and some involving new technologies—to hide objects from view. The latest effort, developed at the University of Rochester, not only overcomes some of the limitations of previous devices, but it uses inexpensive, readily available materials in a novel configuration.
“There’ve been many high tech approaches to cloaking and the basic idea behind these is to take light and have it pass around something as if it isn’t there, often using high-tech or exotic materials,” said John Howell, a professor of physics at the University of Rochester. Forgoing the specialized components, Howell and graduate student Joseph Choi developed a combination of four standard lenses that keeps the object hidden as the viewer moves up to several degrees away from the optimal viewing position.
“This is the first device that we know of that can do three-dimensional, continuously multi-directional cloaking, which works for transmitting rays in the visible spectrum,” said Choi, a PhD student at Rochester’s Institute of Optics.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bziman on Monday September 29 2014, @08:35PM
I read an article about this the other day, and the really cool part was the application. One proposed application allows a surgeon to have an unobstructed view of his working area, despite having his hands and instruments there. The other was for rearward visibility in large vehicles. This would definitely be better than a camera for things like depth perception as well as field of view.
(Score: 2) by MrGuy on Monday September 29 2014, @08:46PM
I'm not clear how this would be reasonably possible.
As I understand it, the object to be cloaked needs to be placed between lenses 2 and 3 of a 4 lens system (i.e. there must be 2 lenses BEHIND the object to be cloaked, and they need to be at precise distances (depending on the focal length of the lenses).
If you're a surgeon, you might be able to cloak your own hands, but there are 2 pieces of glass and metal between your hand and the thing you're trying to cut. If you're trying to use this to cloak part of the back of a vehicle, you need some lenses sticking out behind the vehicle.
I can see why in both cases some way to "cloak" the objects in question is valuable. I'm just missing how this technology would work in those specific cases.
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Monday September 29 2014, @09:20PM
I'm with you and it seems this is of little worth in practice. Like your car example, you would need two more vehicles to haul the necessary lenses just to hide the car from observers in the same lane. Nope, that wouldn't raise suspicion.
I'm sure some magician figured this out and used it for some forced perspective trick years ago and is long since dead.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 06 2014, @04:00AM
So what you're saying is that the alleged practical applications of this are a bunch of smoke and mirrors.