"I wanted to create a vision of Invisibility.... This is a kind of augmented reality."
Susumu Tachi
Thanks to Japanese research, the twenty-first-century soldier may soon be blending invisibly into the background. The man behind optical camouflage, Susumu Tachi (b. 1946), is a professor at Tokyo University, where he works on the "science and technology of artificial reality." Ironically, since he now works to make things invisible, Tachi previously developed a robotic guide dog for the blind.
The optical camouflage developed by Tachi and his research team works by filming the background environment and projecting it onto a coat worn by the test subject. However, this is no average coat. It is covered in thousands of tiny beads that reflect light back to its source, therefore rendering the coat invisible. This is the theory, but in reality the system is still far from perfect and in great need of cutting back on the volume of equipment required.
Tachi patented the "Method and Device for Providing Information" in 2002, and since then the technology or variations of it have been appearing in U.S. military prototypes; monitored surgery may also benefit from the technology. Modern warfare may soon be turning into one big game of hide and seek.
