If you could make a suit that had both tiny cameras and tiny monitors could you become invisible?

Answer 1

It's a little more complicated than that. If you planned to embed your cameras and projectors into your suit, you would face some major problems. You could construct an image of the scenery behind you from the pictures taken by cameras on the backside of your suit. But where would you project this image with your projectors? Straight into the observers retina? Now that would require some serious optics, and a magical way to find out the location of this observer (like the angle of observation AND the exact distance).

The invisibility effect created by that Japanese group (link from a previous answer: http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/02/07/japan.invisible.ap/ ) requires a projector well outside the suit; actually the whole trick is to project the image of things moving behind the cloaked person _exactly_ from the angle of observation into the cloak. So if you are planning to use this cloak to hide from your enemies (or whoever), you would first have to ask them to look you through a special screen (or maybe wear special goggles that include a miniature projector and a bluetooth link to the cameras in your cloak). This technology may have some very interesting applications, but camouflage is not one of them.

There has been some other ways researched, for example color changing pigments in military vehicle painting. These pigments would then be made to image the landscape behind the vehicle, thus making it harder to detect. This approach has naturally severe limitations if you observe this kind of vehicle from different angles, but if you design your vehicles shape well, you could get a very effective, changing camo-painting. And expensive one, and definately not suiting for clothing (because of the complex, smooth shape of human beings, the observation angle really becomes an issue).

However, I've also briefly read about plans to bend light around objects by using some sort of complex metamaterials, thus rendering them invisible. Too bad the original webpage has disappeared somewhere, and only thing I could come up with now was http://science.howstuffworks.com/invisibility-cloak-news.htm . Maybe you can google around and check that out more closely if you are interested.

Answer 2

That would be really impractical and bulky. Easier to setup a system of tiny mirrors that reflect light from front to back.

You can achieve invisibility by reversing the scattering effect of light. This involves synchronizing the wavelength of incoming light with the surface of an object. Easy enough, right?

Answer 3

The military has already been working with this for tanks. The equipment takes a picture of what is on the far side of the tank and displays that picture on the near side of the tank. The effect is that the tank is not easy to see. There are still some things to work out before this technology can be used on clothing to camouflage the soldiers.

Answer 4

No the camera and monitors will let people see you unless they machines can reflect light and make the person seeing themselves. But not totally invisible, since you can't cover your eyes, nose, mouth, etc.

Answer 5

i think the tiny cameras & tiny monitors has nothing to do with invisibility

but lets talk about how to be invisible:
practically its impossible (till now)

why we can't make somebody invisible [but very small particles (like viruses) we can't see them by our ordinary eye (they r INVISIBLE to us)] ??

its all about the wave length of the light ray & properties of light (reflection, refraction, interference & diffraction)
virus has extremely small dimensions that light ray can bend around it so the light doesn't reflect on it (as if this virus doesn't exist) so we can't see it by our ordinary eye, but i case of human the wave length of the light ray can't bend around our body (we r too big) so light reflects on our bodies so we can be seen

the impossibility for making somebody invisible is to make the light ray bend around him [to make this person's dimensions is less than wave length of light ray so light ray can bend around him (like viruses) & this is impossible till now]

i hope u got ur point from my explanation

Answer 6

I believe some clever sod has done just that - or at least a t-shirt. It desplays on the front what it sees behind. Brilliant.

Answer 7

Good idea! Don't think the technology is there yet (though I'm sure they're working on it at the NSA or DoD or someplace).

Answer 8

Some one has already come close to this.