Physicists have drawn up blueprints for a cloaking device that could, in theory, render objects invisible to the human eye.

Visible light normally bounces off an object’s surface making it visible to the human eye. But John Pendry and colleagues at Imperial College London have calculated that materials engineered to have abnormal optical properties, known as metamaterials, could make light pass around an object as so it appears as if it were not there at all.

Metamaterials are metal and electronic composites that can be engineered to precisely control the way light travels through them. They do this by influencing the relationship between an electric field, a magnetic field and the direction of light.

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