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Make Your Own Invisibility Cloak With a 3D Printer
cylonlover writes "Invisibility cloaks have been around in various forms since 2006, when the first cloak based on optical metamaterials was demonstrated. The design of cloaking devices has come a long way in the past seven years, as illustrated by a simple, yet highly effective, radar cloak developed by Duke University Professor Yaroslav Urzhumov, that can be made using a hobby-level 3D printer."
You will see him hiding behind a big off-white disc with holes in it. Call me a nitpicker, but to me "invisible" is the opposite of "visible", which is the defining characteristic of what we call visible light. Being being undetectable to 10GHz frequencies, while impressive in its own light (haha), is most certainly not invisibility.
...but now I can't find my 3D printer
Read up on how they work ;-)
In short, no, they're not like blackholes.
The principle behind them is that emmissons heading into the cloak are routed around the object and then leave, and here's the clever bit, in a direction and intensity equal to what would happen if the invisible object wasn't there.
A drawback of this is, if you were building your cloak on the observable spectrum, if your inside the cloak you can't see anything outside of it (as all the incoming light gets diverted around you)! Admittedly it's only a draw back if looking around you is important, there's good reasons not to care and cool applications e.g. building a sea platform that is invisible to incoming waves (google it, my brain hurts from remembering so much already)
Nothing to see here
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I think it can be integrated in flying cars, to have invisible 3D-printed flying cars.