A new kind of invisibility technology has been developed by scientists from the University of Texas in Austin.

The ability to be invisible at will - who wouldn't want that?

A new kind of invisibility technology has been developed by scientists from the University of Texas at Austin.

The “passive” method to make invisibility somewhat possible involves scattering lightwaves, but this latest development is an active technology that needs electricity to work.

Professor Andrea Alu who worked on the research is quoted as saying: “Our active cloak is a completely new concept and design, aimed at beating the limits of current cloaks and we show that it indeed does. If you want to make an object transparent at all angles and over broad bandwidths, this is a good solution.”

Other studies of passive invisibility cloaks like a plasmonic cloak, a mantle cloak and a transformation optics cloak show that they actually make the wearer more visible and don’t require electricity.

The problem with these cloaks is they only work for specific bandwidths so if one color of light is blocked, then another color stands out even more when reflected off the cloak.

In addition, active cloaks can reportedly be made thinner than the passive ones currently being tested.