Invisibility Cloak demoed at TED2013

I'm here at TED2013 in Long Beach, jacked up on amazing coffee and mind-blowing ideas from today's 4-minute TED fellow talks (the longer 18-minute talks start tomorrow).

I was only part-way through the first day when I had to take a moment to track down Baile Zhang, an assistant professor of physics at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, who had demonstrated his "invisibility cloak." Now I'll admit, when I first heard of Zhang's invention, I pictured - against common sense - an invisibility cloak similar to the one Professor Dumbledore gave to Harry Potter. So I was a little surprised when the cloak looked more like a tiny clear plastic box just a few inches high, reminding me of a magic trick prop my 9-year-old daughter might have. Nevertheless, the cloak's ability to conceal an object so that both the cloak and the object become invisible was astonishing. Zhang placed the cloak over a bright pink Post-it note and voila! Nothing! The pink paper disappeared. And the cloak itself wasn't really visible in the first place.

I found 31-year-old Zhang in the auditorium, watching other TED Fellows talk. He told me the cloak is made out of two pieces of calcite, or optical crystals - found in nature - that are cemented together. The calcite bends light and suppresses shadows, creating the effect of, well, nothingness. When I asked him what his big plans were with this reality-bending invention, he said it had no purpose. He just created it for fun. He does, however, plan to make it bigger. How big? "As large as possible." The idea came to him in 2010, and today was the first time he's shown it to a live audience.

Above: a video of the invisibility cloak taken before today. I have to say, today's demonstration was even more spectacular, but this is still pretty amazing.

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• [liquidself]

  I’m not sure what I’m looking at; but I’m stealing it.

  • [Jeremy Sweeney]

    It’s a prism. So basically, they’re gonna make the shields from Dune. I’m psyched.

    • [liquidself]

      ! It’s a No-Box!

• [gadfly]

  A million fucking dollars.

• [Arnaud Clermonte]

  I bet it wouldn’t work if the background was something else than vertical stripes…

• [Gerald Mander]

  The dropbox link has been disabled due to heavy traffic. Wahhh.

  • [pdffs]

    Yeah, pics or it didn’t happen :(

    • [Gerald Mander]

      No, wait — I just realized that the video is there, but it’s invisible! Proof of its effectiveness!

• [David Pescovitz]

  Ladies and gentlemen, bOING bOING co-founder and longtime editrix-in-chief, Ms. Carla Sinclair! If you don’t know, now you know.

  • [Dean Putney]

    Her first post, too! A momentous occasion indeed.

    • [Nathan Hornby]

      I love BB, swing by at least a million times a day; but I have to ask, knowing the content and the posters – what does a second editor do? I often wonder what the first one is up to – or is it just a title?

      • [Dean Putney]

        Who edits the editors, Nathan?

        • [Nathan Hornby]

          Is it editors all the way down?

• [Dimitrios Papagiannis]

  video gone

• [Kimmo]

  Dropbox for a vid?

  What’s wrong with Youtube? Not like I can’t grab my own copy from there.

• [ldobe]

  From what I understand, these calcite crystals are doing the same thing as a fibreoptic cable.  Like a real life version of the photoshop heal tool right?  Substitutes light from one spot in another, so it looks like nothing’s there?

• [yadayada]

  The link in the story has been boingboinged:

  Error (509)This account’s public links are generating too much traffic and have been temporarily disabled!

• [Sceadugenga]

  There’s a freely-accessible paper from the same team here:
  http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/63912

• [Andrei Daniel]

  After searching for severel minutes I didn’t find the video! Rookie…

• [Art]

  Saw the vid on your link a few hours ago.  Astonishing!  Purely optical. 

  I hope that Mr. Zhang can take this to a higher level.

• [SamSam]

  So does it work from all angles? I might have guessed that the crystalline structure might be similar to, say, fiber optics, which would carry light from the front to the back but not from side-to-side.

• [Nash Rambler]

  Wow.  The military is going to be more excited about this than when that professor from Medfield College flew a Model T around the congressional dome.

  • [alan duda]

    imagine how much time we’d have saved if Bin Laden was just on the Marauder’s Map

    • [Nash Rambler]

      RON: Oh, wait, there he is, in Abbottabad. . .

• [Lotney]

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xw30DykZr6M

• [sparky3489]

  YAY for 2nd grade science!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

• [Joseph Edgar Balita]

  Imagine someone from the Pentagon watching this. Suddenly they’d try to think of StarCraft-esque detector technology.