Real world invisibility cloaks in the making? Yeah, we love the sound of that. Apparently, researchers at Zhejiang University in China managed to pioneer a new method of creating “invisibility cloaks”, as MIT Technology Review puts it, made out of Teflon. Time to make the game hide and go seek a lot more interesting.

At the moment, there are several sources dabbling in invisibility, however, the materials in use are impractical due to the cost and difficulty of use. Luckily, the team at at Zhejiang University managed to get around those obstacles by creating something they classify as an “eye lid” made out of Teflon. Basically, what it does is minimized the alteration of light as it moves past a cloaked entity.

The cloak was successfully tested on a small poker chip-size piece of metal. Surprisingly, though, all this work only took the team 15 minutes to accomplish, so imagine what will happen when (if) this piece of technology is perfected.

Now, we know you’re probably dreaming about Hogwarts and all the evil things one could do with an invisible cloak. However, whatever you’re planning will not work because, in its current form, the invisibility cloak cloak is only invisible to microwaves — it isn’t invisible to the naked eye. But make no mistake, the technology behind this will improve tremendously in the coming to years to make invisibility to the naked eye a real accomplishment.

Indeed, one of the researchers behind this development notes “such a cloaking setup won’t be a big problem to replicate in the THz or even optical spectrum”, opening up the possibility of making a real Harry-Potter-like invisibility cloak in the near future. For now at least, we can only dream of hoping to one day live to see this future.

[via MIT Technology Review, image via DOGO News]