“Third Thumb” Augmentation Changes the Way we Think of Prosthetics
As a fictional device, the so-called invisibility cloak has a long and glorious tradition, from Welsh mythology to Grimm’s Fairy Tales. More recently, Harry Potter has made quite good use of it. Scientists have long discussed about the possibility of being able to manufacture it, one day in a far future. Now it seems we are nearer than we imagined.
Scientists from new York’s University of Rochester have just created something that produces a similar effect. In its present form it’s not a wearable cloak, true. But it is nonetheless the first cloaking device that provides three-dimensional, continuously multidirectional cloaking, as declared by the research team that has invented it. It’s an equipment, composed by a set of lenses that bend light around the “cloaked” object, making it invisible.
“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.” – John Howell (University of Rochester)
The possible uses of this kind of device are endless. You can’t wait for a real cloak to hit the market? Try the Rochester Cloak at home. Yes, the good news is that this device is not expensive either, in comparison to some of the previous experiments in the invisibility field. It cost Howell and Choi, of the University of Rochester, around $1,000 in materials, and according to them it can be done cheaper than that. To encourage people, they have even provided some guidance.
Photo Credit: The University of Rochester
There are a long list of previous essays in the quest for an invisibility cloak. For instance:
* 2006, Imperial College of London, scientists for the first time succeeded in “cloaking” an object and provided theoretical blueprints for the research in this field.
* 2011, The University of Texas at Dallas manufactured a device that uses carbon nanotubes to hide objects.
* 2011, Duke University inventors used meta-materials to create a tiny cylinder that bends electromagnetic waves and makes objects vanish.
* 2013, Baile Zhang, of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, presented at one U.S. tech conference in California. While overall successful, it didn’t work from various angles.
With this new breakthrough in the field, we are closer to Harry Potter’s cloak than ever before.
“It’s like the card people in Alice in Wonderland. If they turn on their sides you cant see them but they’re obviously visible if you look from the other direction.” (Imperial College Professor David Smith, on the device presented in 2013 in California, TED conference.)
About the author
Stephen P. Bianchini is a statistician and a social scientist working in higher education. Based in rainy UK. Passionate about astrophysics, space security, SF and technical diving. Blog: http://earthianhivemind.net/ Twitter: @SPBianchini
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