Researchers in South Korea are developing a cloak that makes soldiers invisible to regular cameras and infrared-based night vision ones. The artificial “skin,” as they’re calling it, allows the wearer to blend in perfectly with his or her surroundings.
The skin can camouflage itself like a chameleon blending into the background. It’s also capable of heating up or cooling down thanks to small interconnected bendable patches that mimic their surrounding environment’s color and temperature.
The patches are made up of individual “pixels,” each containing thermochromic liquid crystals that allow them to change color. The cloak can switch from visible color to thermal camouflage in seconds, allowing the soldiers to remain hidden between daylight and night. The unique feature is designed to make future soldiers challenging to spot by eye and thermal imaging cameras.
The team demonstrated the cloak’s capabilities by placing a patch on the back of someone’s hand. When the hand was placed on a blue surface, the part of the hand with the patch on it turned blue. The same thing happened when they moved the hand across other background colors and temperatures.
Lead researcher Seung Hwan Ko, from Seoul National University, said:
As the hand moves across different backgrounds (whether it is a visible or [Infrared] cloaking mode) …each pixel sequentially switches its color/temperature based on their relative positions.
As exciting as the breakthrough is, the invisibility cloak can’t recognize ambient colors yet, and the experiments still required the researchers to input the surrounding colors manually. Hwan Ko told Defense One:
We still have some work to do to get the suit to actually “see” the color around it. For the study, we accomplished this by manually inputting the color. However, we recently developed a method to detect and mimic the environment by integrating a micro camera with our devices to make an autonomously working device.
The team will now build a larger version and find a more efficient power source to better demonstrate the patches’ suitability for combat. They’re also working on making the device function in extreme temperatures, like the Arctic.
