Last week we looked at the Cana One molecular drinks printer which is functionally (though not mechanically) very close to a Star Trek replicator for drinks and Ken Kutaragi has teased that something like holodeck technology may be in the works.

If asked to name one of the other big Star Trek technologies we wouldn't expect to see especially soon, many might say cloaking.

Advances towards this technology have made it into the news in recent years but this is commercially available.

A group calling themselves Invisibility Shield Co have created free-standing, portable invisibility shields which don't require any power.

These aren't Star Trek style shield bubbles. They're physical and rectangular.

Each shield uses a precision engineered lens array to direct much of the light reflected from the subject away from the observer, sending it sideways across the face of the shield to the left and right. Because the lenses in this array are vertically oriented, the vertically oriented strip of light reflected by the standing/crouching subject quickly becomes very diffuse when spread out horizontally on passing through the back of the shield. In contrast, the light reflected from the background is much brighter and wider, so when it passes through the back of the shield, far more of it is refracted both across the shield and towards the observer. From the observer's perspective, this background light is effectively smeared horizontally across the front face of the shield, over the area where the subject would ordinarily be seen. 

Curiously they're selling them through Kickstarter and have already received a lot of orders.

Our mind quite seriously boggles at the terrifying applications for this.

Which brings to mind the reason the Federation generally didn't use it.

Gene Roddenberry indicated in various interviews that "our heroes don't sneak around", indicating that the Federation made a conscious decision to not develop cloaking technology.

In one of those rare cases where it was employed in a potentially justifiable fashion - hiding an anthropology team observing what they thought to be a pre-warp civilization in Star Trek: Insurrection - we also see it used to hide a vessel intended for use in the kidnapping of those being observed.

That drinks replicator makes alcoholic beverages, right?

Now might be the perfect time to test those.

[ Main Image: Invisibility Shield. Credit: Invisibility Shield Co. via YouTube. ]

References

Hambling, David (May 6, 2015). US army calls for ideas on invisible uniforms for soldiers. New Scientist.

Invisibility Shield Co. (March 16, 2022). A Real Working Invisibility Shield. Kickstarter.

Memory Alpha. Cloaking device. (viewed March 17, 2022)