www.realtechnews.com/posts/1860
Brian Berris Contributing Writer, RealTechNews Invisibility Cloak No need for dressing up in all black when trying to be sneaky. Instead wr ap yourself in an invisibility cloak and prance around like fool without being noticed Well perhaps it hasnt come that far, but the invisibil y cloak has now become a reality. The material itself is like a large f lexible display and a camera takes what it sees on the opposite side and displays it on the back making it see through.
This stuff is NOT a new high-tech electronic cloth with millions of lightsource points that duplicate the missing portion of the blocked view along with being able to correctly re-correlate the viewpoint differences and not show the -wrong- angle. This cloth these guys appear to be pushing is -old- news. At one time, I worked for the US Coast Guard on a black-hull boat. We were part of the construction fleet and we were responsible for building and maintaining all types of Aids to Navigation for ships and boats on the US waterways. Those nav aids are very important, they help keep heavily loaded deep-draft boats out of the shallow water and theyre sort of like traffic lane control signs. At night, beyond 500 yards, they are for the most part, invisible. Unless they have the retro reflective tape applied to them. This tape is made by 3M and is called retro-reflective because it -reflects- almost 80% of the light thats shined on it, no matter from how far away that light comes or what direction it comes from. White is what they use for projector screens in movie houses and is what is recommended for use with modern day video projectors, the kind used with computers) The tape is kinda thick, approx 20-30 mils and is made of three or more layers consisting of at least a base layer, a layer of spray on microscopic glass beads (the actual reflector), a sealer layer and a transparent color top layer. The tape idea is at least 30-40 years old, and has been in use by the Coast Guard since they discovered how well it reflects spotlight beams from towboats on the Ohio and Missippi rivers. And yes, those boats DO have incredibly bright spotlights, you need them when youre pushing half a million tons of whatever upstream in the dark at three in the morning. What you are looking at in the picture above is a PROJECTED image. Projected onto someone wearing a cape or coat made of this cloth. Meaning the projector is sharing the same field of view with the camera that took the picture that you are seeing. Its not magic: think of someone standing up in front of a motion picture screen in a theater, while the movie is playing. Think about how visible they actually are when the reference points that you normally use (the outline of their body, for instance) are oversrayed by whatever image the projector -paints- them with. In this instance, its the background they are standing in front of. Now add a coat of this flexible screen material, (been available for years, mind you) and you have a projector screen on the person, result: Invisible people. Hook up a camera to the input of the movie projector and move the whole thing, projector and camera unit, (minus the screen) outside. Take a still picture of the background, turn on the projector, and have your test subject walk around in front of the background scene. The visual cues that tell you where they are have been blended into the background thats been projected onto them. Move that camera viewpoint any, and you lose the illusion due to angular correlation that you cant correct for, because you are after all using a still frame or motion frame shot of the background.
I think theyre using an advanced video processor to capture realtime moving outline or frame of just the garment only, (possibly by illuminating the garment with infrared and translating positional info) then they inject into that resulting frame a pre-recorded image of the background. Like looking through a garment shaped keyhole that moves around. And since the projector gets that keyhole image as its only video source, well, everything else is black. No projector illumination anywhere except on the garment. Oh and the garment made out of retro-reflective whatever. I could do a proof of concept like this if I had the money.
His head suddenly becomes invisible, and we see the background. This would be impossible using the method described, as the coat itself has no way of knowing whats on the other side of his head. Indeed, by applying the same logic, the hood would offer no protection against viewers directly behind the wearer, as well as the more obvious vantage point directly in front.
Invisitibility Cloak Youll Never See Susumu Tachi invented and designed an invisibility wall/cloak. This thing has been bouncing around the internet for a while. He seems to have gotten bored with his invisibility cloak and has decided to start work on an invisibility wall.
If you did some reading on their site, youd know that this IS just d one for the wow factor, but that there ARE real applications for it, mainly in the augmented reality and telepresance fields. Basically, the article sumary is dead wrong, the cloak itself is not a display and has never been claimed to be, except by the guy who wrote this summary.
This is clearly pretty fake and while there is a cloak that does inde ed have a display, its current state of development is nowhere near what is artificially shown in the video. Furthermore it has so far been designed to only work basically from three angles.
Yeah, pretty darned tough to wrap myself in a projector screen and pu t a camera in front and a projector in back. What happens after I move out of the line of sight of the projector?
And no, this is not so easily explained/duplicated, but Ill give it a shot. Notice the shadow cast by the TV and how it dissapears when shown through the cloak? I believe thats because the dudes filmed the scene before hand without actors with a spotlight near the camera (in fact you can see from the old TV shadows that the light source was probably above the camera). Then, all they had to do was project the scene from the side, match up the scale and press play. The movie playing on the TV was likely timed to play in sync with the projection. As far as the projection not playing off the tie or the guys face, it was probably too low of a power setting to reflect properly. Still, I could easily be mistaken and I doubt I could replicate the feat.
I saw this demoed at the Wired Magazine NextFest Show in Chicago at N avy Pier. The demo had a sort of viewfinder like device on the table. The viewfinder looks on to a image produced by a regular projector. Then a guy in a yellow raincoat comes over and stands between the viewfinder and the projected image. The person looking through the viewfinder will see that the raincoat has now changed to completly conceals its wearer by blending him into the projected image behind him. Really cool if they can ever get flexible display tech to be built as thin as fabric till then this is a dream project waitin on new tech advances.
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