London-based Invisibility Shield Co. say the fully functional shields can hide a whole person. Science fiction is turning into reality.
Turns out that Star Trek’s Romulan Cloaking Device wasn’t THAT far fetched: a British company claim to have made a real-life invisibility shield and is now taking orders.
While previous attempts where made using a camera that captures what’s behind the shield while the shield itself was a screen, this innovation, made from fully recyclable marine grade materials, uses a precision engineered lens array to direct much of the light reflected from the subject away from the observer. This sends it sideways across the face of the shield to the left and right.
From the observer’s perspective, this background light is effectively smeared horizontally across the front face of the shield, over the area where the subject would ordinarily be seen.
“The shields perform at their absolute best against uniform backgrounds such as foliage, grass, rendered walls, sand, sky and asphalt,” the inventors explain in their GoFundMe page. Backgrounds with defined horizontal lines work really well too and these can be natural features such as the horizon or man made features like walls, rails or painted lines.
Also very important, creators say that the shields would not work as an anti-riot shield. “The only thing our shields have been designed to do is shield you from view,” they say. “The shield faces and supports are made from a flexible/non-rigid material, they have not been designed to protect you from any kind of attack and would not be of any use in such situations.”
The current challenge of the inventors is the cost of shipping and the size of the warehouse where they store the shields. “If we receive a large number of pledges it would be advantageous to seek a bigger facility because we wouldn’t need as many just in time deliveries of materials and we would likely be able to deliver a large number of shields more quickly,” they say.