"Invisibility "Cloak"" Topic

New from BAE

link

Who knew J.K. Rowling's dabblings in physics would prove more fruitful and useful than those in literature.

On second thought, that's setting the comparison bar a bit low …

I read a novel, The Shooting of the Green, years ago that had a suit for a person to hide his IR signature. It was like wearing a sauna suit. But interesting to see the technology catching up to the fiction.

Pretty neat.

I imagine impersonating a cow will be safer than a car.

I'd rather be a car than a cow if I was anywhere near a bull! Moooooo-ve!

I don't know if that image is simulated or not, but it seems to me an enemy tank commander would wonder how a car had managed to suspend itself a good three to four feet in the air…

Oooh, good, more invisibility cloaks.

I'll but them with all those flying cars and directed-energy weapons I have in the shed.

All the best,

John.

Yup, right next to the F-22 in the shed.

Now that's kinda cool. Going to make for some boring models though, I love seeing my armour stowed to blighty :P

"You! Are you a tank?"

"No, I'm a car..see?"

"Okay. But you looked like a tank for a second there. Hey! You #2, are you a tank?"

"No tanks here. I'm a car too…see?"

*rumbles onwards*

"This is supposed to be a war. Where are all the %Y*$ tanks?!"

I like the Japanese version better. It looks like a hooded raincoat, and the early versions (from 7 years ago) could display the image of what was behind the wearer, and match the movements in real time. Probably glowed like you wouldn't believe in IR, but that's a matter of development.

I think that I mentioned these in another thread about Starships.

The technology in this "cloak" uses the exact same technology that is used in many satellites (especially spy satellites).

The technology is quite robust, and is not an "Invisibility Cloak" by any stretch of the imagination.

It is just a more powerful form of camouflage that happens to function in the IR range of the spectrum rather than in the visible light.

The same technology will eventually be applied to the visible light spectrum as well, and it will give tanks a funny pixelated lok like the Predator's "Invisibility Cloak" (You could still tell that something was moving, but it was freakishly hard to get a silhouette). UCSD has a lab that currently has panels about 5cm to a side that do the same thing (they sense the surrounding light patterns and then project it to the opposite side of the vehicle.

UCSD's panels are also crenellated, like the 3D Projection Panels that are used for Hatsune Miku.

YouTube link

This allows a 3D image to be projected from the panel.

And, like all other technology that becomes "just engineering," in another 5 to 10 year's time, the size of the panels used in this technology will be reduced to a small enough size such that even from a distance of 20 meters they will be very hard to detect.

Take a look at the Hatsune Miku video.

That is run from a couple of off-the-shelf PCs, and her image is created in a software package like ZBrush (at very low res to make the power consumption lower for the projection).

But, if they wanted to run a more powerful parallel network of processors, they could make Hatsune Miku look very much like a real person.

If Fact, you could take the 3D files of the recent Andy Serkis Performance of Caesar from Rise of the Planet of the Apes and project them onto that 3D screen and it would look like Caesar was dancing and singing Melt by Hastune Miku.

Apply that same technology to a camera and projection system and you can hide a tank, or a battleship quite easily from visual or IR.

Eventually, although it will take some meta-materials that are quite complex and freakishly expensive right now, we will be able to apply the same ideas to the rest of the EM spectrum.