A Canadian camouflage manufacturer has been taking grand steps towards making Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak a reality.
From Hollow Man to Predator, from Hogwarts to The Incredibles: the fantasy of being invisible has been a fixture of our entertainment for centuries.
Its real-life potential is groundbreaking: best witnessed by Hyperstealth Biotechnology, who have applied for patents on its ‘Quantum Stealth’ tech.
Check out the video from Hyperstealth below:
While not packed with the same vanishing capabilities of the boy wizard’s cloak, it effectively conceals whatever is behind it – here’s how it works.
By using lenticular lenses (which you’ll be familiar with if you’ve seen those fancy 3D DVD covers), the ‘inexpensive and paper-thin’ technology bends light around a target to alter its position or make it vanish altogether, leaving only the background visible.
Hyperstealth released a lengthy video explaining the technology, displaying its usage by covering a miniature tank with a small piece of the material – as you’ll (not) see, the tank is covered.
What’s great about ‘Quantum Stealth’ is it requires no power source, therefore it has near-unlimited usage, can be used during the day or night and is incredibly cheap to produce.
As per The Telegraph, Hyperstealth said:
One piece of Quantum Stealth can work in any environment in any season at any time of the day or night, something no other camouflage is capable of.
Hyperstealth CEO Guy Cramer demonstrates another example in the video, using the material to obscure himself with a handheld riot shield – the technology has been demonstrated to hide a target in the infrared, ultraviolet and thermal spectrum.
Cramer started developing the tech back in 2010, and since then has been working with military organisations to speed up the process.
IFLScience explained the principle behind this tech is called Snell’s law:
The principle is known as Snell’s law. Every material has a specific refractive index, a quantity related to the speed of light in that material compared to the speed of light in a vacuum.
You can see the effect easily. Get a glass of water and put a spoon in it. It will appear bent. The same effect makes pools appear shallower than they are. When light moves between two materials, the angle at which it is moving will change depending on the refractive index. So by being clever with materials it is possible to construct something that has a blindspot. And that’s where the invisibility happens.
The British Columbia-based company also applied for three other patents: a ‘solar panel amplifier’, a holographic display system, and ‘Laser Scattering, Deviation and Manipulation’.
The latter would be used to detect surroundings at a higher resolution via LIDAR systems.
If you’re still confused (I am a bit), have a look at Hyperstealth’s full video here.
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After graduating from Glasgow Caledonian University with an NCTJ and BCTJ-accredited Multimedia Journalism degree, Cameron ventured into the world of print journalism at The National, while also working as a freelance film journalist on the side, becoming an accredited Rotten Tomatoes critic in the process. He’s now left his Scottish homelands and took up residence at UNILAD as a journalist.