Rochester Cloak So personal cloaks are in the realm of possibility at most 5 years down the line, if not sooner I predict. This made me wonder. In Trek, we have many examples of cloaking devices for large spacecraft yet very few examples of personal cloaking devices. Most of these devices are seen as exotic and used sparingly. Could it be because of energy requirements? The Rochester Cloak seems to prove otherwise.
The Rochester "cloak" is yet another in a tediously long line of Hollywood-style optical effects that "journalists" never tire of calling "invisibility cloaks." Another of the Rochester optical illusion videos, featuring an adult and a child doing partial "invisibility" gimmicks in a hallway, is the same gag used in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY to show two astronauts on Discovery's bridge standing at different orientations. Until someone takes a design out into public, and people are not required to "stand here and look only down this controlled sight line," it is not an invisibility cloak. It is a visual effects gag. (And every design prompts the same clever applications: doctors will be able to see through their hands, pilots will be able to see the runway at their feet, etc. Find me professionals in those fields who need that functionality first.)
Well, it's not about what it's called. They could call it "Gimmicky Optical Illusion" for all it matters. I look at the possibility of a real cloak becoming reality some day, based on this technology. Surely this counts as progress toward that goal? And I'm sure surgeons do need that functionality to make their work easier.
You're sure of it? My sister is a surgical tech. I'll get her to ask the surgeons she works with. They have all kinds of retractors, probes and even tiny cameras. I doubt they'd want a meter-long telescope that will mess with their hand-eye coordination. Not likely. Perhaps the lenses will be of a different sort, such as negative index materials ("left-handed materials"), but I don't see even that working. There are many ways to be invisible without being literally invisible. My cat and an ex-Marine friend can both do it very well. And before you start in with the "maybe it will work better in space" argument, let me recommend Project Rho, an excellent resource for budding sci-fi writers.
They'd need the functionality but obviously not a big contraption to realize that function. Should be interesting to hear what your sister says. Well, just because there may be many ways to be invisible doesn't mean one with a tech device can't or won't be invented. How many inventions in the world today were because they were likely 20 years back? Invisibility tech isn't an absolute miracle that breaks the laws of physics, in my view. Thanks for the Project Rho link, though I wasn't about to make that argument!
Sorry for the delay. My sister was on vacation, and then I was too busy to visit the forum for a stretch. My sister replied: So perhaps surgeons do not need invisibility at all. Telepresent robots and other tools might be far more welcome with refined "haptic" feedback.