- [Narrator] Ever wanted to be invisible?
We might be closer than you think.
(electronic music)
Alright, admit it.
All of us at some point in our lives have wanted
to be invisible and this desire goes back a long way.
Look at the Greek myth about Perseus who used invisibility
to defeat the monster Medusa.
Skip ahead a couple thousand years and characters
from Harry Potter to Smeagol.
(dramatic music)
Precious.
Uh, have used invisibility in a very similar way
and it's not a big surprise.
I mean, invisibility represents power and freedom
and lack of accountability.
But today, researchers, scientists, engineers,
they're working on real non magical ways
to make objects invisible.
One approach is just to make the forward facing side of you
look like whatever happens to be behind you.
In the wild, we see this with critters
like the crazy octopus that have natural camouflage.
Which makes me think, hey the CIA once experimented
with making pigeons spies, but just imagine what would
happen if you made an octopus a spy.
But more on topic I think, you know,
human skin doesn't do that.
But maybe we can create a technological optical
camouflage system.
Well there's some people who are working on just that.
They created a retro reflective material.
It kinda looks like a movie theater screen.
So imagine you've got an entire outfit made of this stuff.
Behind you, you have a rear facing camera
capturing high quality footage and feeding it to
a projector in front of you.
The projector projects an image directly onto
that retro reflective outfit that you're wearing,
and voila, invisibility.
See, researchers have been playing with this
and it's pretty cool but it has big drawbacks.
The big one, ha, being that you have to carry
a lot of stuff with you.
Cameras, projectors, computers,
even more if you wanna cover more than just the one angle.
So, what if we looked at something else like metamaterials.
Metamaterials are tiny, artificial structures
built in the lab.
You don't find them in nature and that's a good thing
because you don't wanna be bumping into
an invisible cactus or an invisible bear.
When light strikes a normal piece of matter,
let's say a bear, or a bear with octopus arms,
photons will strike that substance and scatter
and some of them will bounce back and hit
photosensitive cells in your eyes.
Which sends information to your brain.
That information might be,
holy cow, there's a bear with octopus arms over there
and he looks really angry.
So imagine you are there, 20 feet away,
octo bear is right there,
but fortunately you're wearing your metamaterial
cloaking device.
Now in this case, the light will hit the metamaterial
and bend around it.
Kinda the way water bends around a rock in a river.
This isn't even camouflage, this is actually invisibility.
Awesome, right?
Okay, there are a couple of drawbacks.
You knew this part was coming.
For one thing, metamaterials really just work with
microwave radiation, not visible light.
The two are similar in a lot of ways
but visible light has a much shorter wave length,
and that makes it harder to manipulate.
But this technology will still allow us to improve
upon stuff we use today like radio towers.
We can make them invisible to each other
which would cut down on interference during transmissions,
or that optical camouflage device I talked about.
You could turn that around and make a system
that eliminates blind spots in vehicles.
I've got a question for all of you.
What instance of invisibility in fiction is your favorite?
Let us know know in the comments below,
and make sure you hit like and subscribe to our channel.
Join all of my buddies and hey,
check out these videos over here.
They're out of sight.
(electronic music)