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Chinese Invisibility Cloak Dazzles and Amazes Four Years Too Late

Wednesday, February 28, 2024Wednesday, February 28, 2024By William Mapp
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Chinese Invisibility Cloak Dazzles and Amazes Four Years Too Late

The last several weeks have been abuzz in science technology. Science and fantasy buffs have been going wild over Twitter posts featuring an invisibility cloak invented by Chinese scientists. These posts have been mostly propagandistic in nature with an underlying criticism of the US being left behind. I’ve been critical of our focused efforts of using technology to extract more dollars out of consumers instead of relieving the world of its problems, but sometimes I have to call BS when I see it.

Propaganda Hype Machines

All countries engage in hype and propaganda. The US included. Since the Chip War started between the US and China, Chinese media has gone gangbusters publishing stories about new processors and chip technologies that are lightyears beyond the technologies built between US and Taiwanese manufacturers. Seemingly, these Chinese-made super chips came out of nowhere shortly after the Chip Trade War began.

We’re only a year and a half into the Chip Act. It takes years, YEARS, to construct semiconductor foundries of the type Taiwan has built. And more years to implement the tooling and processes necessary to manufacture chips at scale. But somehow, these Chinese super chips are available, in China. If China had this capability for year, why did they even care about procuring chips from Nvidia, Intel, and others?

Are these power chips as powerful as the media make them out to be?

Back to the Cloak

In the latest, we-don’t-need-American-crap-we’re-better-at-making-things-than-you, a video featuring a Chinese announcer flanked by two assistants holding a pane of material is being boosted around the Internet.

The two assistants bring the pane in front of the announcer and voila, his bottom half is rendered invisible.

US doomsayers pointed at the video, “look here, and see what China’s doing. We suck!”

Sometimes all you need to do is a little digging. Hyperstealth, a Canadian company, specializes in camouflage and stealth technology. They detailed an invisibility cloaking technology 4 years ago via an expose from Wired Magazine.

The technology works by embedding multiple lenses on a transparent material. The lenses are aimed at different angles that bend the light around the subject standing behind the cloaking material. The closer you held the cloak to the subject the less well it performed, but at a certain distance the subject is cloaked from view.

The material demonstrated in this Wired video looks very similar to the brand new cloaking material first invented by Chinese scientists a few months ago.

All of this is to say, there are plenty of things we don’t do well in the US. We have lots of problems. But that doesn’t mean we’re not innovating and inventing things. As one of the few countries honoring intellectual property that allows other countries to file patents in their system, we’re still leading in the invention race.

So don’t believe the hype and do a little digging first.

Yeah, I’m claiming Canada.