OpticalCamouflage
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Cornell scientists perform optical illusion, herald invisibility through bending of light (video)
Taken at face value, you'd almost think that Cornell scientists had successfully bent the fabric of time. With gobs of fiber optics at their disposal, the researchers have devised a method to distort light in a way that makes events in time undetectable to observers. Initial success in this Pentagon-backed invisibility project has cloaked an event for 40 trillionths of a second, leading Cornell scientists to tout, "You kind of create a hole in time where an event takes place. You just don't know that anything ever happened." The feat is performed by separating light into more fundamental wavelengths, first by slowing the red and speeding the blue. A resultant gap forms in the beam, which leaves a small window for subterfuge. Then, as the light passes through another set of fibers -- which slow the blue and speed the red -- light reaches the observer as if no disturbance had taken place at all. While the brilliant researchers ultimately imagine art thieves being able to pass undetected through museums with this method, the immediate challenge will be in prolonging the light gap. This could prove frustrating, however, due to the scattering and dispersion effects of light. As Cornell scientists dream of their ultimate heist, visual learners will most certainly want to check the video after the break.
Kinect now offers a stealth mode, courtesy of optical camouflage hack (video)
You've seen so many Kinect hacks by now that you probably think you know them all -- but wait, have you seen one that makes you look like Predator when he's busy predatorizing the populace? Or one that lets you reenact your favorite Metal Gear Solid scenes with Snake's camo turned on? Yup, a Japanese coder by the name of Takayuki Fukatsu has exploited the versatile openFrameworks to give Kinect a mode where it tracks your movement and position, but turns the dull details of your visage into an almost perfectly transparent outline. Of course, you're not actually transparent, it looks to be just the system skinning an image of the background onto the contours of your body in real time, but man, it sure is cool to look at. You can do so for yourself with the video after the break.
