Star Trek Beyond: 5 Ups And 3 Downs (The Science Edition)

4. Invisibility Cloaking

Cloaking devices are pretty much a holy grail of military technology, as well as a stalwart of Star Trek lore - you can't target something you can't see, after all.

Generally speaking, current invisibility technology is working on the concept of bending light, or even sound, around an object in order to render it invisible, or using metamaterials to absorb and manipulate wavelengths of light to cloak objects. This is perfectly possible, in the sense that the laws of physics don't forbid it, but it's definitely tricky with objects any bigger than a coin.

Jaylah's camouflage in Beyond, however, is described as a “holographic camouflage”, suggesting that it has more in common with the projection based invisibility cloaks that we've also seen in the real world. This would take an image of the surrounding environment and project it either onto the surface of the object you wish to hide or, as in Jaylah's case, as a hologram around it, completely shielding the object from view.