Cloak of Invisibility

[Occhidiangela]

I was under the impression that

a)  It's actually an image projected onto the fabric.
B)  It only works for a single point of view, and any other angle from which one might view the "cloak" would give the person away.
Seems a novelty and nothing more.

Edit:  Upon digging up a bit more information (and remembering an old video of the same technology), it is in fact a projected image that requires an apparatus to be between the viewer and the "cloak", projecting the image onto the cloak of what's on the other side.  So you'd see the slight shimmer... and a bulky piece of tech on either side of the "hidden" person.
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Doc, you might want to re-read the words I underlined from the abstract's excerpt. The thickness of the lens, divided by two, has to be bigger than the object to be masked. An aircraft carrier is a few hundred feet wide, and about eleven hundred feet long, and a roughly 200' masthead height. USS Abraham Lincoln, CVN 72, a modest example

The Lens' effective thickness must thus be about 2200 feet, and I am guessing it's height at about 400' And it needs to be portable. The engineering solution to that is probably not to manufacture wonderful 2000 foot thick glass or plastic lenses, which have their own considerable visual signature, but to be able to emulate/synthesize that lens effect with other materials, and or electromagnetic fields.

Cloaking an aircraft carrier using this theoretically possible method has the thorny problem of non homogeneous color (wavelength variation of reflected and absorbed light) given the variety of things on the visible portions of the typical aircraft carrier. I suspect that the Navy's answer to that corner of the design challende is "We'll, paint it all gray." That wasn't an uncommon philosophy on some of the ships I served on, so the cultural / behavioral obstacle to narrow bands of visible light should be overcome with relative ease.

The hard part, the tech side, is another matter.

Occhi