'Invisibility-Cloak': Remember how Harry Potter had what was called 'The Cloak of Invisibility'? It was an artefact to make the person who used it invisible. How many times have you wished for something similar? Well, you weren't the only one and now there is a chance for that to happen.
In Rochester University, they have unveiled what they call the 'invisibility-cloak' in honor to the famous Harry Potter method and actually a theory that has existed for centuries. Scientists in Rochester have found a way to hide objects from the sight. So far, they have been trying with a pencil, a ruler and a hand, among other things.
What is cloaking? Basically, it is rendering physical objects undetectable or invisible.
The scientists at Rochester University have created this 'Invisibility-cloak' not with a sort of cape or piece of clothes, like it happened in Harry Potter as that would indeed be too good to be true, but with lenses.
They make it very clear from the beginning of the video that cloaking is "essentially an optical illusion." It's not about making the object really disappear, but making it "look" like it disappeared.
The main idea of how they use the lenses it to make light pass around them and due to the angle of vision and how the light passes through the lens, the object cannot be seen by the person looking through the lens.
It is a bit complicated to explain, but in plain sight it looks rather simple and as they have mentioned, not expensive.
Joseph Choi, graduate student of Optics has said, "This is the first device that we know of that can do three-dimensional continuous multi-directional cloaking."
This permits that the background doesn't really get distorted. Just like in Harry Potter, the illusion is for the one who watches, but nothing in the world really disappears. Harry became invisible as long as the cape covered him, and the object between the lenses here is at a certain angle that it becomes 'invisible' to the eyes of the viewer.
It actually reminds a great deal to the famous quote, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder," only that here would be modified to, "Reality is in the eye of the beholder."
