Cloaking - Now You See Me - Now You
Don't!
Source: ViewZone In the early part of World War II, a group of Naval
Admirals and officials from the War Department watched in disbelief as
an assortment of illustrations was presented by a special team that
had been commissioned to camouflage naval ships. The Naval gray and
blue ships were easily spotted against the horizon and made excellent
targets, their silhouettes contrasting with the bright sky. The
illustration and models were anything but mute. The single color
battleships and destroyers were depicted with bold zebra stripes and
highly contrasted bands of white and black. One Admiral remarked that
the so called camouflage reminded him of striped prison clothes,
designed to be noticed, and the meeting ended with some cigar smoke
and a few jokes. But what started out as a joke was, in fact, the
brilliant beginning of a new science which had made advances in
camouflage through carefully studying the animal kingdom and human
perception.
Like the African zebras, whose highly visible black and
white stripes hardly seem the best way to hide, these patterns have
been demonstrated to confuse and blend in to tall grass and bush at a
distance. It is not so much that they are invisible but that their
exact shapes and outlines become complicated to discern from the
surrounding shapes and patterns.
At some point in the Cold War, the British commissioned
a study on how best to camouflage tanks, the primary weapon in a NATO
European conflict. Several colors were tested but all failed to
disguise the tanks when back lit by a sunny sky on the changing
battlefield horizon. One crazy idea, though, worked almost perfectly.
British engineers had covered a tank with hundreds of light bulbs
whose illumination could be varied. When these lights were adjusted to
the ambient light level of the back-lit sky, the tank was virtually
invisible to a distant observer even with the use of binoculars.
In recent years, may UFO sightings have reported the
apparent disappearance of circular craft in broad daylight, preceded
by what appeared to be adjustments made to its surface luminescence.
The popular 1980's television series Star Trek had an invisible field
generator scripted in to the Klingon (an often hostile alien race)
battleships, often surprising Captain Kirk and crew when they suddenly
"decloaked" near the starship. Epic mysteries like "The Philadelphia
Experiment." where the US Navy is alleged to have made an entire
battleship disappear in the harbor, in full view of hundreds of
witnesses, by using some type of radio frequency waves, have fueled
the mystery of invisibility.
Now, years later, the science of invisibility - of
cloaking people and machines - has leaped to the present: Enter
Project Chameleo.
According to Executive Summaries, Project Chameleo's
new cloaking device is designed to conceal an object by placing a thin
video screen between the observer and the object being concealed, at
the same time, presenting a full color image of the background scene
to the viewer. The illusion is that the viewer can see "through" the
object being cloaked.
High-speed processors, improved video chips and lighter,
more detailed display panels now allow for stationary or moving
vehicles - even soldiers - to be cloaked. What's more, because these
cloaking images are able to be "stored" (like any digital image) or
projected "live" there is the potential to "call up" various scenes
like vegetation or naturally occurring rock formations, as well as
"live" projections of
the background, to make "blending in" as perfect and easy as the
reptile that the Project Chameleo was named after.
At present, records indicate that video camouflage for a
tank or fighter jet would cost about 10 million dollars each. Some
unexpected cost saving benefits have been found. Because the displays
can be made to change from light to dark, their ability to reflect
heat and thus maintain cooling inside such vehicles as tanks has been
an added bonus and an energy saver. Universally applied to these
typically "hot" vehicles, Project Chameleo could save energy cooling
costs by as much
as 8 billion dollars.
Someday... Our dingy apartments or bedrooms could be the
things we camouflage, transforming them into a sunny beach or a
download from the surface of Mars. If these systems are implemented by
the military and private security sectors, this could potentially mean
as much as 20 billion dollars in
production contracts spread across the US over the next five years.
This type of mass-production would dramatically reduce
the cost of such display panels and bring their civilian use to an
affordable range. Some of the current hesitation with this system
stems from the perception that such display devices are fragile and
subject to flickering, but Project Chameleo documents show that this
problem is easily overcome with present existing technology. Project
Chameleo currently holds the patents for this new cloaking technology
and their success in marketing and finding new and unimagined
applications for this technology will doubtless change the face of our
world in the future.
And what about those wild and gaudy battleships? A US.
Naval Engineer said that the stealthy requirements of large
battleships now must include radar and heat cloaking but he suggested
that a system like the Project Chameleo could be useful for smaller
craft or covert reconnaissance.
Technology is approaching the point where the display
panels do not need not be flat, like those in laptops. Configurations
of curved or even flexible screens may soon allow for clothing and
other unusual surfaces to be visually transformed by this same
technology. The image of the soldier in such a "cloaking uniform"
(above) is not as far off as you may think.
Letting your imagination travel through the future, it is possible
that entire buildings could be transformed into natural murals (or,
more likely, unavoidable advertisements). Someday surfing the internet
may involve environmental adventures within special digital "rooms"
paneled with these same displays... Our dingy apartments or bedrooms
could be the ultimate things to camouflage, transforming them into a
sunny beach or a panoramic download from the surface of Mars.
http://www.viewzone.com/cloaking.html