Two companies offer invincibility shields for two different uses.
In 2019, after nine years of research, Canadian company HyperStealth Corp. succeeded in developing a technology that can render invisible an object or person placed behind the shield developed by the company. Invisibility is achieved by deflecting the path of light.
People or objects placed behind the shield equipped with this technology are not illuminated, so they cannot be seen. The HyperStealth company used the Snell-Descartes laws of the XVIIᵉ century relating to the reflection and refraction of light rays to develop their project.
The device is based on the refraction principle of two materials, which creates a reflection blind spot and prevents light from passing through the shield. The shield material also features the same principle as that of the lenticular lens, which allows you to see an image only when you’re in the right place, i.e. you can see that something is lurking behind it, but you can’t distinguish its shape or nature.
HyperStealth Corp. specializes in camouflage clothing and has filed a patent to protect this technology and launch a manufacturing process, primarily for military use.
British company Invisibility Shield Co. has launched an internet crowdfunding campaign to commercialize invisibility shields, and has already managed to raise €80,000 in March 2022, with 53 days to go before pre-sales close.
The company will offer to send purchasers an invisibility shield for playful use. At present, only twenty-five prototypes are in operation, and this collection will enable the product to be marketed on a large scale.
The device resembles a semi-transparent pane of glass that can be placed in any environment. It operates completely autonomously, as the glass relies on a network of optical lenses that play on the refraction of light to make objects placed behind them disappear.
The network of lenses is designed to direct a large part of the light reflected by the observed subject away from the observer, sending it laterally to the left or right. The light becomes very diffused as it passes through the shield’s background, and from the observer’s point of view, this light is spread horizontally across the shield’s front face, preventing the subject from being seen where it would normally be.
The use of lenses to play on the properties of light has been used in many devices such as cameras, microscopes and telescopes in the past, and more recently, companies are turning their attention to new shield-type products. Invisibility Shield Co., for example, offers its shield for €359 for a dimension of 95×65 cm.
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