Slashdot Mirror
Researchers Develop Purely Optical Cloaking
Rambo Tribble writes: Researchers at the University of Rochester have developed a remarkably effective visual cloak using a relatively simple arrangement of optical lenses. The method is unique in that it uses off-the-shelf components and provides cloaking through the visible spectrum. Also, it works in 3-D. As one researcher put it, "This is the first device that we know of that can do three-dimensional, continuously multidirectional cloaking, which works for transmitting rays in the visible spectrum." Bonus: The article includes instructions to build your own.
It's interesting, but I can't have been the only kid to have noticed my thumb disappearing between two magnifying glasses decades ago.
It is a simple terrestrial telescope. Objects on the focal plane, but outside focal point will not be seen.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I can't understand why this made /. since it shouldn't have made the (nonexistent) school physics paper.
Oh, if you look through this little thing, there are things that automagically disappear. Doesn't matter if you look at the object from another angle and not through a lens, it isn't cloaked anymore.
I think people need to understand that is not cloaking, it's just a very complicated explanation for a phenomena that's well known. So unless they have a lens that can surround an object from all sides that could cloak said object... then again it might just be easier to develop the theory behind just using energy waves, then inertia dampeners.
I have seen a device that uses just mirrors and this obscuring. Many a times I am stuck behind a mob of people and did not have a clear view of the action going on the other size. Then they invented this miracle device that cloaks all the people in the middle and I could the other side unimpeded. It is typically made of cardboard and a couple of mirrors with decorated with color paper. Hurray for cloaking. Great!
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
It's even cloaking the website!
It's the ROchester MUltidirectional Lens ANgle cloaking system.
Anybody want a peanut?
Better yet:
1. Invent Cloak
2. Write Story giving directions
3. get slashdotted
4. website becomes invisible.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
What I find truly amazing is that there are still enough people around here to actually /. a site.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
Won't work. Well it work in one special case, but not in the general case. Any time the fiber path (defined by the two endpoints of the fiber) isn't parallel to line of sight, the light coming out the end of the fiber won't match what's directly behind that point. So if you place a camera in a specific spot, and you route the fibers from the front to the equivalent position in the back (relative to the camera), then it would work. But the moment you moved the camera, the fibers would then be at an angle instead of parallel to line of sight, and the "background" as seen through the fibers wouldn't align with the actual background. It also fails when there's parallax. Line of sight is diverging rays shooting out from the eye, so the fibers have to be aligned at that exact angle of divergence. If the eye is closer or further, there's parallax, and again the background through the fibers doesn't match the exact background.
Basically, your optical fibers are just mimicking putting a TV in front of the object and displaying an image of the background on the TV. A real cloak can't just take light which strikes a plane (sphere, whatever) on one side and emit the same light on the opposite side. It also needs to preserve the arrival angle of the path that light was taking as it struck one side, and emit it on the other side at the same departure angle it would have taken had the cloaked object not been there. Which this clever arrangement of lenses does (albeit for a very narrow field of view).