"Digital Integral Cloak": New Invisibility Cloak Uses Flat Screen Displays
A Rochester Cloak is a cloaking device that can be built using inexpensive, everyday materials. Developed by University of Rochester researchers, the device features four standard lenses that allows an object to appear invisible as the viewer moves several degrees away from the optimal viewing positions. Using the same mathematical framework as the Rochester Cloak, University of Rochester researchers have been able to use flat screen displays to extend the range of angles that can be hidden from view. Their method lays out how cloaks of arbitrary shapes, that work from multiple viewpoints, may be practically realized in the near future using commercially available digital devices. The Rochester researchers have shown a proof-of-concept demonstration for such a setup, which is still much lower resolution than the nearly perfect imaging achieved by the Rochester Cloak lenses. But with increasingly higher resolution displays becoming available, their new 'digital integral cloak' will continue to improve.
Transcript
00:00:00 So, perhaps you're familiar with the Rochester Cloak. We wanted to make a next-generation version of a cloaking device. We have a background and this background of these blocks emits rays and these rays are collected by a scanning camera. This camera determines both the direction and position of those rays. Then knowing the direction and the position of those rays we can then calculate where those rays will be at any distance away from the, the background so we then can make a composite image using these, the information scanned from the camera and then project it on this high resolution display. This composite image is such that as you move to the left or to the right the background is always preserved looking like it's in the, in the correct position
00:01:00 which means that we can hide an object behind the display and it will appear as if it's, if it is invisible. Now this works over a wide range of angles almost thirty degrees and as we improve the pixel density of these displays for example, this iPad Mini has 326 pixels per inch, we can get higher resolution images and a wider range of angles over which it will work.