Invisibility

[Lin Evans]

Just for fun folks... On Facebook, someone posted a video depicting a man carrying a roll of plastic. When he unrolled the plastic and covered himself with it, he became transparent and it was possible to see the leaves, trees and landscape behind him. It was, of course, a hoax made probably with Adobe After Effects but lately there have been numerous videos of this guy and the text that goes along is that a "professor in Hong Kong," or a scientist in South Korea or someone else had invented this. Of course many people were fooled and thinking it was real, shared the video. It got me to thinking how nice it is to have the ability with PTE to make objects invisible but of course using the "opacity" tool will make a subject disappear, but not in the same way as by drawing a piece of plastic over makes the subject disappear a little at a time. Of course by using the proper masking techniques in PTE it is completely possible to do this so I created a little fun show doing this very thing. 

It did, however, get me thinking about real invisibility. In physics labs today it's possible to make small objects invisible by bending light around them, but we are far from being able to make a human disappear - or are we? I got to thinking about how that might be possible. Today we have totally flexible materials which function perfectly for electronic displays. They are available but not being sold or used at present. What if a suit were made out of this material including gloves and a hood. There could be two small irregular patches of something like dark mosquito netting allowing the person wearing the suit to easily see, but it would be almost impossible to see their eyes and with an irregular shape it would pretty much render them (eyes) invisible. Now place an array of tiny cameras on the back of this suit pointing and focused at what would be behind the subject and connect them so that a continuous video was displayed of the landscape behind on the front and sides of the suit and one would have virtual invisibility from the front assuming sufficient brightness.  From even a shot distance the subject would be pretty well camouflaged and appear to be just more of the background as long as he/she remained within the proper zoom range. Just a thought !!  Perhaps it has already been done? Who knows...  Anyway - a little fun show of PTE's masking capability...

http://www.lin-evans.org/lin/invisibilitypc.zip  (about 13 meg)

http://www.lin-evans.org/lin/invisibilitymac.zip (about 13 meg)

Lin

[chanfi22]

Congratulations Lin for this invisibility demonstration. Very fun and successful.

[Lin Evans]

Thanks!  It was a fun little experiment...

Best regards,

Lin

[JRR]

very effective Lin

[MUR]

Hi Lin

Very interesting

MUR

[Bert]

Nice demonstration

Bert

[Jean-Cyprien]

HI Lin,

I think it is already possible to do what you mean by using the chroma keys.

See for example the videos :

 

 

 

[Lin Evans]

LOL - Yes, chroma key extraction works well for movies and videos, but not for the real world where there is no projected or generated background. What I have in mind doesn't require any specific background or projection - just a simple reproduction of whatever the existing background on the  display which the subject wears...  Two ways of achieving invisibility - one for the studio and another for virtually any environment. 

Best regards,

Lin