Nah, surely not a cloaking device?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7553061.stm

:)

[edit] StarTrek will happen. :)

Kewl. I remember reading about meta-materials a few years back.. for cars.

Imagine a car being covered in such material, I'd rather not be in it on a busy road. ;)

I was thinking that if they did use it for Military camoflage ala Crisis and the material is really limited maybe it would make sense to have teams of midget commandos, that way they could get 3 suits from each batch of material instead of one. Of course the weapons might need some modifiying but a team of mighty, midget commandos would be extremely cool.

Darkheart

Do you guys really think, they would give something like this to regular citizens? How many laws do think would be broken? Once, and if, it is done, only military would keep this. I cant see goverment etc, allowing the regular joe, getting this. To dangerous.

This thing is real, I have tried it!

You are a mighty-midget-commando?

Darkheart

I wouldn't be surprised if much more advanced versions of this already exist. There was an article around a year ago about scientists who had developed a material that was able to bend microwaves around it so that the object itself couldn't be detected and that technically a higher resolution version would enable invisibility for light and they expected to develop this in another 15 years - saying that, military technology that you don't hear about is 15 years ahead of what you see introduced to the public anyway.

Agreed, by the time we hear about something like this, the chances are the military has already been doing/using it for a while.
Ive seen something like this with cameras and fiber optics that simply had a bad chamelion blurry color effect.
Nothing as cool as this could be though!

It would be interesting to know what the current military tech is if we only see stuff that is around 15 years old.

Current tech is used by aliens, they us us to suplly them with new technologies :P

Am I the only one who wonders how the light knows where to exit on the other side to avoid distortion?

Without checking more into it as I heard of this a long time ago, I thought it just bent light. I'm sure for pictures they set it up just right..

The light doesn't know. It's just how light works. Instead of typical absorption or reflective materials, the invisible stuff will work like wind around an object in a wind tunnel, the light will simply slide around it and out the back.

I'm sure it would be impossible to get true invisibility, there will probably be evidence of the edge of the material, like in any video game today.

Hold it!!! You are wrong there pal, true invisibility is possible in video games, dont lie now!!!

Yeah, just set entityalpha to 0.0. :)

Yeah, that'd be terrible if nobody else could see you.

You'd get cars pulling out of junctions in front of you, and not using their indicators, and tailgating you, and dawdling along at 30mph in a 60mph limit so you can't get past... actually I'm starting to think my car has a cloaking device installed already... :/

heheh GFK said it best, it's so true, we are already invisible when driving car, almost

Hmm yeah haha...

Just make a picture of the background and print it big enough so you can hold it in front of you, tadaah, cloaking... ;-)

In a way this is possible, it's not so hard to bend light by letting it go from one material to another. Another example is fiberglass, which can also bend light.

The hard part would be that when you would walk around something using this technology, would it still work then?