This is cool, except these metamaterials will have much more use in science than they ever will in the fields people <i>imagine</i> they would.<p>Militarily speaking, cloaking isn't a practical thing. From what I understand the first 'cloak' was like 10-20% of the objects volume. This means to cloak a plane it has to be 10-20% larger in certain spectrum's. Not only that, but the plane would be forced to be subsonic, the fragile structure of a metamaterial (literally they're hollow structures) would be destroyed at supersonic speeds and even if it wasn't the heat generated by going supersonic (friction heat) would cause it to expand and distort the 'cloak' into different wavelengths and efficiencies.<p>This might be used for UAV's and maybe armed UAV's, however, if they ever make one that cloaks the visible spectrum I believe there would be great use in hiding security devices, like an infrared camera or sound recording devices.<p>I think it's an amazing breakthrough, just the uses are going to be extremely different than anything ever seen in a movie. I mean I've read newspapers describing it like Harry Potter's cloak of invisibility, which is quite laughable as a fabric made of a metamaterial that could cloak a human would be like a foot thick and probably wouldn't survive any form of movement.<p>The epitome of stealth technology for a person would more likely be akin to the cloak Frodo has in the LOTR, which doesn't make him disappear but makes him look like the dirt he's hiding on, it's just an advanced form of camouflage not pure fantasy.