Predator Style Invisibilty Suits One Step Closer

Scientists in Germany have improved on the developments made by a group of scientists in California in 2008 by making a three dimensional object invisible.

A group of scientists headed by Xiang Zhang at the University of California, Berkeley developed a new material which could make objects appear invisible. The “metamaterial” that they developed was able to deflect light waves and make an object appear invisible, but only in two dimensions. Basically things could only be hidden if looked at straight ahead, if you walked around the object it would reveal itself.

But now boffins at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany have improved on the metamaterial so it can actually wrap around an object and completely cloak it.

“You could imagine you have a flat gold mirror and you could put an object on that mirror,” Tolga Ergin from the Karlsruhe Institute explains.

“An observer could immediately tell that there is a bump there and that there is an object hidden. Now we can put the three-dimensional carpet cloak on top of that bump so that the bump disappears – so the observer would again see a flat mirror.”

Mr Ergin is quick to point out that we may still be many years off producing military cloaking devices.

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