10 Inventions That Will Make Harry Potter A Reality

The ability to turn oneself invisible would definitely come in extremely handy in our day to day lives. Bumped into your ex? Just disappear. Did your dirty joke not quite take off at a dinner party? Throw on an invisibility cloak and you won't have to deal with it.

That's the dream anyway.

There are lots of different invisibility technologies being researched out there at the moment. One that is making fairly big news at the moment is the research on metamaterials.

These artificial materials are designed so that they interact with light in a very special way. They are made up of structures similar in size to the wavelength of visible light, meaning that they will skew, bend and distort light waves so that the object that they are covering is rendered essentially invisible. Unfortunately, this technology currently only works on tiny, two-dimensional objects. Quite the catch.

The general theme of invisibility is focussed on manipulating light so that it bends around and object, but some have also used projection in order to disguise themselves. The idea is that you film whatever is going on behind you and project it onto whatever you're wearing.

There's a catch with this one too. It requires the person to wear a special suit and take a camera and projector everywhere they go. This is probably less than practical.

However, given the amount of research being put into invisibility, largely because of its military applications, many experts agree that the days of total invisibility may not be too far off. Good news for the socially awkward and incorrigibly sneaky.