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Comment by david_shaw | Hacker News Reader

If a car manufacturer can create this technology as a marketing stunt, I'd be really interested to understand the (existing) military applications of "active cloaking."

It doesn't really make things completely invisible, but it sure does seem like excellent camouflage.

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It only works if you're staring right at it though. Once you change the angle it looks very wrong.

Yeah, you really need something like they do in Mission Impossible 4 where it has a single target whose eye it's tracking, changing the perspective projection accordingly.

I wonder if you could use multi-faceted light emitters, capable of showing a different colour on each face. It wouldn't solve the issue completely but would definitely alleviate it!

I was actually just thinking about this. We're almost at the point now where you could reasonably package multiple LEDs into a multi-surface package, and do so relatively cost-effectively.

The other side (pun intended) of this problem, though, is that you'd also want to capture imagery from as many perspectives as you planned on reproducing, which is a slightly more involved packaging issue. ;)

You would need to emit at infrared and UV also. As soon as anyone started doing this it would be standard to check things in multiple frequencies.

Then you run into your next problem which is depth perspective which would be off if you're not at the right distance(notice how weird the kids dancing look when they move the camera in close).

Existing efforts have mostly been focused not on the visual portion of the spectrum, but on IR, since that's where military vehicles tend to stand out most starkly against the background.

Here's some links, which should give you some idea of what the performance is like:

http://defense-update.com/20110512_eltics_black_fox.html

http://defense-update.com/20110905_bae-adaptiv_camouflage.ht...

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