Written on July 30, 2008 – 9:53 am | by Bogdan Alex |
Being totally invisible could bring some nasty benefits to most people. You were probably asked to think what you would do if you somehow got lucky and stumbled upon some cloaking device that would rend you invisible. I won’t talk about this things here. However, I do want to let you know that total invisibility will soon be possible in the real world.

DVice informs that researchers at Imperial College London are trying to create a cloaking blanket to hide objects in visible light. This is going to be pretty difficult since the visible light has a small wavelength which makes it difficult to work with. Researchers need to channel the light in specific ways if they really want to cloak something.

In order to build such a cloaking device, the scientists over at Imperial College London will be required to use “some clever nanotechnology," as John Pendry, one of the scientists working on the technology told the Discovery Channel.

Pendry explains that the implied nanotechnology may work like a mirage, which, is a form of cloaking found in nature. But the blanket won’t be forming any temperature gradient as a mirage does to shroud things; it will be using a mixture of silicon and silica, causing visible light to make an about-face, resembling a mirror.

The British team of researchers is quite confident that they would eventually come up with a true cloaking blanket within the next few years.