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This story is from the category Display Technology
Date posted: 17/05/2009 Just when you thought invisibility cloaks couldn't get any weirder, researchers come up with this: a way to make one object look like any other. The illusion is a two-step process, and to see how it works, imagine making a mouse look like an elephant. The first step involves an idea that these guys came up with about six months ago in which they described a way of cloaking objects at a distance. The trick is to create a material in which the permittivity and permeability are complementary to the values in a nearby region of space containing the mouse we want to hide. "Complementary" means that the material cancels out the effect that the mouse has on a plane lightwave passing through. So a plane wave would be bent by the mouse but then bent back into a plane as it passes through the complementary material, making the mouse disappear. The second step is to then distort this plane wave in the way that an elephant would. This means creating transformational material that distorts a plane lightwave in the same way as an elephant. So anybody looking at this mouse would instead see an elephant. An invisibility cloak is just a special case of this, when the mouse is simply replaced by the illusion of free space. See the full Story via external site: www.technologyreview.com Most recent stories in this category (Display Technology): 25/05/2013: Facial Recognition Technology Proves its Mettle |
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