Coming soon to a retailer near you... Robco's Stealth Boy!

[Talisien]

Check this out:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061019/ap_on_sc/cloak_of_invisibility

I think that this is pretty cool, myself. In a few years, this may actually be advanced enough to put to practical uses in the armed forces. That would make comat sort of interesting, no? Of course, then you get the nut that tries to pull a Hollow Man with his Stealth Boy...

 

[victor]

Pretty old, but cool nonetheless. If used in the army it would probably make war pretty unbalanced, that is until they come up with some lifesign scanner or something.

 

[Xellos]

it's just one of the possibilities offered by the metamaterials, which have the negative angle of refraction. Another interesting feature avaible is making the lenses more accurate than any of produced today. More info about metamaterials :

http://www.imperial.ac.uk/research/cmth/
http://www.nanotechnology.bilkent.edu.tr
http://esperia.iesl.forth.gr/~ppm/
http://ee.duke.edu/~drsmith/

 

[Stock]

Pretty old, but cool nonetheless. If used in the army it would probably make war pretty unbalanced, that is until they come up with some lifesign scanner or something.

Such device already exists. FLIR. (Forward Looking Infra-Red)

 

[Talisien]

I have to say that I doubt FLIR would work. This device bends light, and infra red IS a type of light, after all; just not part of the spectrum normally visible to humans.

 

[Xellos]

FLIR could work 'cause particular metamaterials do bend only a part of electromagnetic spectrum , so if one bends light , it could not probably bend infrared rays (although I'm not sure, infrared has a frequency just a bit lower than visible light)

 

[Lord 342]

Holy Hell -Thermoptic Camoflage!
Sonar is the way to defeat such things as this.

 

[Talisien]

Lord, read the article again. It says

In a very speculative application, he added, "one could imagine 'cloaking' acoustic waves, so as to shield a region from vibration or seismic activity."

If it can shield an entire area from seismic activity, I'm pretty sure sonar won't touch it.

It would probably take multiple devices, though, to become totally 'invisible'. One tuned for visible light, one for infra red, one for ultraviolet, one for acoustics(sonar), etc. I can't see one device being able to block all of them. Not yet, anyway.

And you can be sure that they are looking for ways to get around their own work, at the sae time. No one wants someone else to use their own work against them.

 

[forddieselguy]

I saw an article about a Japanese fellow who had a coat made of material that could show a camera image and had cameras mounted in various points, kind of like the DB7 in 007. All you could see was what ever was past the guy, cool stuff.

As far as the cloak goes, I feel sorry for the guy that misplaces it, and then no-one can find it....

 

[Gonzalez]

I have to say that I doubt FLIR would work. This device bends light, and infra red IS a type of light, after all; just not part of the spectrum normally visible to humans.

There is a confusion of concepts here. Light is a type of radiation, and what you can see in infra red is another type of radiation called heat. So basically it would not block infra red detection, although there are other ways of blocking it.