An update to the Optical Camouflage article from a few months back. Wired Magazine gets behind the technology and discusses the future of invisibility, "Invisibility has been on humanity's wish list at least since Amon-Ra, a diety who could disappear and reappear at will, joined the Egyptian pantheon in 2008 BC."
With recent advances in optics and computing, however, this elusive goal is no longer purely imaginary. Last spring, Susumu Tachi, an engineering professor at the University of Tokyo, demonstrated a crude invisibility cloak. Through the clever application of some dirt-cheap technology, the Japanese inventor has brought personal invisibility a step closer to reality... In Susumu Tachi's cloaking system, a camera behind the wearer feeds background images through a computer to a projector, which paints them on a jacket as though it were a movie screen. The wearer appears mysteriously translucent - as long as observers are facing the projection head-on and the background isn't too bright.
To achieve true invisibility, optical camouflage must capture the background from all angles and display it from all perspectives simultaneously. This requires a minimum of six stereoscopic camera pairs, allowing the computer to model the surroundings and synthesize the scene from every point of view. To display this imagery, the fabric is covered with hyperpixels, each consisting of a 180 x 180 LED array behind a hemispherical lens. Nice.
