Let’s be honest. Unless you’re the one with the ability, invisibility in-game is pretty much hate-tier.
Getting gutted from behind, or shot in the head by an enemy you just can’t see, is one way to really rub one up the wrong way.
But what if we took invisibility out of the game and into the real world?
The Invisibility Shield 2.0 is a real, physical thing that lets you hide in plain sight. Not with smoke, not with mirrors, not with some clever camera trick, but by bending light in a way that makes whatever’s behind it incredibly hard to see.
The shield is built using a series of vertical lenses that redirect light horizontally across its surface. Instead of light bouncing straight back to your eyes, it gets spread out, which means the background behind the shield gets stretched and smeared across it.
So when you stand behind it, your outline doesn’t reflect back properly; it disappears into the noise. This means it works best when you play by its rules.
Stand a short distance behind it, keep your movement minimal, and give it a reasonably consistent background, and the effect is genuinely convincing. Step out of those conditions, and it starts to fall apart a bit. Movement especially shows through, looking like a holographic tazo that’s in between two images.
But when it works, it’s actually quite astonishing to consider that it exists.
What makes this especially fun is that it’s not locked behind some research facility or industrial use case.
You can actually buy one. Or could…
Depending on the size, the Invisibility Shield 2.0 sits anywhere between $60 and $950, which works out to roughly R1,200 to R16,000 before you factor in getting it into South Africa. And those costs were on Indiegogo’s webpage, because of course this was a community-funded project from a company that doesn’t seem to have any sort of website or current social media presence.
Which means I wouldn’t necessarily be too excited about putting my card details into the system right now. But I am sort of tempted. Even if it’s just a little.
At the end of the day, the technology isn’t perfect, but it’s quite close to creating the illusion of invisibility, and it could be a fun gadget to have around the office for paintball days, or perhaps something more useful like shooting wildlife photography.
Nonetheless, it’s cool to see humans trying their best to create superpowers we would usually only have access to in games, instead of asking AI how to make 2-minute noodles.
