In one of the Harry Potter films, Harry wears a cloak. A special one. It makes you invisible. Guy Cramer from HyperStealth isn’t one to let the movies do the dreaming. He’s making the Harry Potter camouflage cloak a reality. He’s not a magician or anything like that. Guy Cramer specializes in camouflage. Creating patterns that will help camouflage soldiers. It’s a very specific part of graphic design aimed at making things blend in with the environment and tricking the eye. The exact technology behind the Quantum Stealth can’t be disclosed, but here’s some mock-up photo’s that will give you an impression of what it will do. Notice slight differences in the colors on the picture inside, with the wall as a background.
Camouflage itself has been used for about 100 years, first being used by French soldiers. Until then, hiding wasn’t really important for armies. Like in the old days where battle’s we’re fought by men standing in several rows, being obvious and dressed obvious as well. The French, being French, thought artists could help out to make their soldiers blend in with the environment and hide from the Germans. You can imagine the then hand painted garments weren’t very effective, let alone affordable. In the early days of camouflage armies may even have been reluctant to use it, not wanting to creating confusion among soldiers so they would end up shooting their own. Camouflage patterns started developing in the Vietnam war into more complex patterns. And since the nineties camouflage patterns started to develop into digital like pixellated patterns now seen on many military garments. It’s during these developments that Guy got involved creating camouflage patterns. And now he’s taking the art of concealment one step further by bending light.
Is this too good to believe? We’ve found some critical articles about this wondering the same thing, and Guy admits on his website that he understands people being skeptical. But he is getting media attention, even from CNN. We haven’t seen the technology ourselves, but Guy does make people wonder, and question, and be surprised. What do you think? Is this the real deal? And what’s more: could it be used for more peaceful activities than war, like observation of wild animals?
