Future: Making gadgets invisible

It is often people imagine a future where our human skills will be lost. We'll be life-forms around plethora of machines helping and regulating us. But while we are advancing towards future, it can be seen slightly. Here's two mind-blowing projects, i was honored to know about.

Sixth Sense
How nice a thought, draw a watch on the wrist and there's time. Make gesture of taking a picture and it it's taken. Like those Harry Potter movies, there is actually in real life videos in the newspaper. Latest status on boarding passes. Solving what should i buy problem. Dialing on the hand. Using paper as a digital medium, you can drag a graph or some paragraph from the paper to the digitally connected paper. Collaboration of this intimate technology is amazing.
It also looks the real version of Hollywood Movie, Minority Report.

Invisibily Cloak: Not too far

Scientists say they are a step closer to developing materials that will render people and other objects invisible.
Researchers say they can redirect light around 3D objects using metamaterials--artificially engineered structures created at a nano scale that contain optical properties not found in nature, according to an Associated Press report.
People see objects as a result of the light reflecting or scattering off them. This new mixture of materials has "negative refractive" properties that keep light from being absorbed or reflected by the object, allowing only the light from behind the object to be seen. Essentially, the material bends visible light in a way that eliminates the creation of reflections or shadows in much the way water flows around a stone.
The findings, to be released later this week in Nature and Science, were made by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, led by Xiang Zhang. The research, which was funded in part by the U.S. Army Research Office and the National Science Foundation's Nano-Scale Science and Engineering Center, could have broad applications, including for the military.
But the materials work in limited wavelengths, so they won't be used to hide buildings from satellites, said Jason Valentine, who is a co-author of one of the papers.

"We are not actually cloaking anything," Valentine told Reuters. While the Harry Potter series of books and films has made the idea of a personal "invisibility cloak" popular, he says, "I don't think we have to worry about invisible people walking around any time soon. To be honest, we are just at the beginning of doing anything like that."

Disappeared: One can get Invisible, Only 5 Years Wait more!!

An invisibility cloak just like the one Harry Potter used to creep out of Hogwarts could become a reality within five years.
But instead of using magic, researchers from Purdue University, Indiana are using 'nanotechnology' and 'metamaterials' along with Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

Invisibility cloaks will work by bending light around an object

It works by bending light around itself like the flow of water around a stone, which would make both the electromagnetic cloak and the object inside hidden.
'The whole idea behind metamaterials is to create materials designed and engineered out of artificial atoms, meta-atoms, which are smaller than the wavelengths of light itself,' Professor Vladminr Shalaev said.
In his study reported in the journal Science, Shalaev used an array of tiny needles radiating outward from a central spoke, like a round hairbrush, that would bend light around the object being cloaked inside.
These tiny needles decrease the refraction or distortion of the light to almost zero, rendering it invisible.

These two images (cloak off, top and cloak on, bottom) show how objects might be 'cloaked' by bending light around them to render them invisible.

'Whereas relativity demonstrates the curved nature of space and time, we are able to curve space for light, and we can design and engineer tiny devices to do this,' he said.
He added that as well as bending light they could do the opposite - concentrating light in one area.
The new technique could be used to create optical microscopes so powerful they would make DNA visible to the naked eye and superfast computer microchips.