Invisibility’s Next Frontier: Scientists Cloak 3-D Objects

• By Katie Drummond
• Email Author
• January 25, 2012 | 
• 7:00 pm | 
• Categories: Science! 

After five years of steady progress, scientists are now edging closer and closer to mastering real-world invisibility.

Sure, researchers have already made marked strides toward making objects unseeable. But much of the work was more like mimicry: Meta-materials that bent light around an object to conceal it, but only worked in two dimensions. Or a device that played tricks on the eye, by harnessing the mirage effect to make objects behind it “disappear.”

Now, a team of researchers have taken an incredible leap forward. They’ve successfully made a 3-D object disappear.

A group of scientists at the University of Texas at Austin have figured out how to “cloak a three-dimensional object standing in free space.” That means the object is invisible, from any angle of observation.

“This object’s invisibility is independent of where the observer is,” Professor Andrea Alu, the study’s co-author, tells Danger Room. “So you’d walk right around it, and never see it.”
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Watch: ‘Invisibility Cloak’ Uses Mirages to Make Objects Vanish