Two years ago, British inventor Tristan Thompson (not the Cleveland Cavaliers player) created an Invisibility Shield, Kickstarting it with £446,676 in pledges. (That’s about USD $565,000.) Now Thompson says he’s improved the design, making it larger and more comfortable to carry, and is Kickstarting this Invisibility Shield 2.0:
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As for how it works:
“Each shield uses a precision engineered lens array to direct light reflected from the subject standing behind it, away from the observer standing in front. The lenses in this array are oriented so that the vertical strip of light reflected by the standing/crouching subject becomes diffuse when spread out horizontally on passing through the back of the shield. In contrast, the strip of light reflected from the background is much wider, so when it passes through the back of the shield, far more of it is refracted both across the shield and towards the observer. 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 optical arrays we use to construct our shields are manufactured by extruding and then embossing a polymer to form sheets of elongate, convex lenses. In order for these sheets to manipulate light in the right way to create functional invisibility shields, the lenses must have a highly specific shape and each one must be formed with high precision as they are very small.”
The video footage, assuming it’s undoctored, is fairly startling:
The shields come in multiple sizes: The one-person version runs $378, and the two-person Megashield is $883.
Source: core77