A couple months ago, we wrote about an invisibility cloak made by researchers at Duke University. Well new breakthroughs have been made, and the invisibility cloak is one step closer to becoming a reality.
We’re all familiar with the invisibility cloak. Someone needs to hide, and quickly. They pull out their invisibility cloak, wrap it around their bodies and voila! They’ve disappeared.  It has made appearances in countless movies and saved hundreds of good guys from the prying eyes of villains. But according to recent breakthroughs, the invisibility cloak might in fact finally be on it’s way towards reality.
The invisibility cloak doesn’t look exactly like one would expect – not like it does in the movies anyway. In fact it looks somewhat like a combination between a waffle and the paper snow flakes that you made in kindergarten. But it still works! And the design of it isn’t as random as it looks either. In fact, every single aspect of the design is perfectly calculated. The object that is to become invisible is placed in the center of the “cloak”. The cloak is then blasted with microwaves, and the object becomes invisible. The way that this is done is that the holes in the plate are arranged in a certain way so that the microwaves are directed by the plates dielectric shell, and then are re-radiated out the back of the plate. This causes the object to apear invisible.
Here’s the interesting part. The entire process is done using a 3D printer. What this means is that anyone who owns a 3D printer can make an invisibility cloak of their own. And, once the technology is further developed, anyone will be able to make an invisibility cloak that works in other ways, without the need to use microwaves.
A big drawback to the technology of course is that it only works when it’s hit with microwaves, but the team behind the technology believe that they could perfect it to manipulate light in other ways, and to be a much bigger device. Basically, the people over at Duke are still working on creating the perfect invisibility cloak, but it seems that it is well on its way and we should expect to see more about this technology in the near future!
