Technology and advancement has become the best of friends in today’s age. Do you know that some Chinese researchers have gotten together to reveal a ‘ghost cape’ which when adorned on an object can make it look like something else entirely. Although there are multiple devices and tech objects that make a particular item invisible, this team from Southeast University in Nanjing, China believe that their technique is far superior to what exists in the market. While other such products can only hide an object, this can entirely change how it looks.
This technique has a very unique way of functionality. It scatters incoming lights that fall on the surface of an object to create two ‘ghost’ images on either side of the cloaked object. Researchers led by Tie Jun Cui at Southeast University in Nanjing, China say, “The creation of wave-dynamic illusion functionality is of great interests to various scientific communities. The research could have unprecedented applications in the advanced-material science, camouflage, cloaking, optical and/or microwave cognition, and defence security, etc.” This is not just in theory as the team has already built a prototype of the same. The researchers claim that the ghost images can be altered depending on the construction of the cloaking device, its shape and other such important properties.
They say, “By using the space transformation theory and engineering capability of meta-materials, we propose and realize a functional ‘ghost’ illusion device, which is capable of creating wave dynamic virtual ghost images off the original object’s position under the illumination of electromagnetic waves. The scattering signature of the object is thus ghosted and perceived as multiple ghost targets with different geometries and compositions.”
At present the invisibility cloaks in the market work on a two-stage process. At first, there is an invisibility stage which distorts incoming light to remove the scattering effect of the cloaked object. Now the Chinese team has found a simpler way to make it look like another object. The scattered light from an object is distorted to look like something else. There is ‘symmetry of the effect’ which means that the light is scattered on both sides of an object, making two ghost objects. The end result is two smaller looking objects which is more complex than the original object and much different too.
