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This Incredible Invisibility Shield is on Kickstarter

By Rain Noe - March 28

in Object Culture

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:

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:

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The shields come in multiple sizes: The one-person version runs $378, and the two-person Megashield is $883.

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Juan Cano

7 months ago

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Well that japanese video was the bomb. I am not sure the use of this tech? At first i thought maybe someone birding could use it but you can't see from the back side either. I am sure there's a function for it.

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. JC

7 months ago

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It is doesn't work as well if your background has vertical patterns.
Here's a Japanese video roughly showing how the lens work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3QklyR_EEw

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Dan Farrow

7 months ago

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I was wondering why they don't show the view from the other side then I found the FAQs: "Our shields work similarly in both directions so the shield bearer will find a person standing on the other side invisible to them too." So... what is this useful for besides novelty value?!

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Dee An

7 months ago

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This could be used on theatre stages and TV sets to minimise the visual impact of items such as second cameras or anachronistic street furniture.
I was watching some low budget TV show the other day, contestants completed tasks in a field. I noticed a patch of field had been blurred in post production - I assume to hide a second camera unit.

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