Nature perfected the cloaking device long ago in marine animals like octopi and cuttlefish, which can change skin colour in order to blend into their surroundings. Inspired by these denizens of the sea, an interdisciplinary team of researchers have designed a new heat-sensitive synthetic material that changes colour when exposed to light.
It's not exactly field ready—the material is just one inch square in size right now—but it does offer a peek into how a future cloaking device might work. The researchers say it could be scaled up and wrapped around larger objects as the technology develops.
“This is by no means a deployable camouflage system but it’s a pretty good starting point,” John Rogers, one of the lead authors of the research paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences told National Geographic.
The device consists of a flexible skin that the researchers describe as being similar to a sheet of pixels laid out in a grid. The “pixels” are black at room temperature, but change to white and shades of grey as light crosses them, triggering diodes that raise the pixels’ temperature slightly.
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