What are your thoughts about invisibility cloaks?

Question

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/AheadoftheCurve/wireStory?id=5552603

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080811/ap_on_sc/sci_invisibility_cloak

http://infinitylabs.net/2006/07/03/invisible-cloaks-in-action-video-demonstrations/

http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/image006_3.gif

http://inventorspot.com/files/images/invisibility-cloak-12.img_assist_custom.jpg

What do you know of other types of "quasi-invisibility"?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKPVQal851U

Answer 1

Here are the first two paragraphs from an article in the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) Spectrum Online magazine.

By Neil Savage

New optical materials that bend light in unusual ways could lead to much tinier transistors, microscopes that are able to peer at smaller cellular structures, and—with a good deal of engineering—even invisibility cloaks.

Two new types of metamaterials, as the light-bending stuff is known, were developed by researchers at the Nano-Scale Science and Engineering Center at the University of California, Berkeley, and described in separate papers in Nature and Science. One is the first three-dimensional material to have a negative index of refraction, which allows it to bend light in the opposite direction of what you would expect from any other material. The other, also 3-D, doesn’t have a negative index but still provides some negative refraction, and unlike previous metamaterials, it does so in the visible part of the spectrum.

follow the link below for the rest of Neil's article