It’s not quite a Harry Potter-caliber invisibility cloak, but scientists have developed a cloaking
device that will hide an object in motion.
Hey everyone.
Amy here for DNews.
In the real world, invisibility comes down to a trick of light.
We see objects because light reflects off them and hits our eyes.
Cloaking an object involves bending the light that hits our eyes around an object so we
can see what’s behind that object but not the object itself.
The problem with cloaking devices for a long time has been that the object being hidden
and the person looking at the hidden object need to be stationary; move at all and you’ll
see the object and the cloaking device, destroying the illusion.
But researchers from the University of Rochester in New York have found a way around that.
Or, more specifically, have found a way to more effectively bend light around an object
so it can move and still be invisible to a viewer.
It’s the first device that can cloak multidirectionally in three dimensions, and they’ve done it
using nothing but four standard lenses like you’d find in any lab.
The key is in the set up; they figured out exactly what power of lenses and how far away
to space these lenses to cloak a moving object.
With the lenses in a row, light from a background is focussed down to a point through one lens
then diverges out, bending around an object placed in what they call the “cloaking field”
as it moves to be focussed down by the next lens.
As long as you’re looking through the first lens, anything moving within about 15 degrees
of the centre of the cloaking field will remain completely hidden.
And it’s a system that can be scaled up using larger lenses to cloak larger objects.
This cloaking setup isn’t quite ready for a night sneaking around.
The scientists from Rochester anticipate more scientific uses for their setup, like a surgeon
being able to operate on a tiny area without having his view obstructed by his hands.
So what do you guys think: are these multi-lens setups the invisibility cloak of the future?
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