The Green Head:

A professor at the University of Tokyo has developed an optical camouflage system that makes a special reflective material seemingly disappear, including the wearer! The picture on the coat is made by a viewfinder which puts together the moving images behind the wearer.

This is kind of an old story, but it’s still pretty interesting for a slow Sunday. This could be a joke or a hoax or what, but if it’s true it’s amazing. Check out this video here in particular.



  1. Pat says:

    I thought this was an old technology. The use of a green background allows a background image to be displayed.

    The movie Titanic uses this technique on several outdoor shots. The easiest to see would be where DiCaprio stands on the forerail with arms outstretched. It was all shot in the studio with the only props being the forerail mock-up in front of a green background. The background was all added later on top of the green.

    Weather reporters use this when they display their maps. They stand in front of a green screen and the map is projected over it. Only the green background will show the map so they may move their arms around to point items out without any reflection off of their body.

    If there is something new here I didn’t catch it.

  2. Chris says:

    This is not ‘green screen’ or chroma key. It is an old story though. Essentially there’s a video camera behind the guy and a projector shooting video from that camera in front of him. It’s a long way from being a true ‘invisibility cloak’.

  3. SignOfZeta says:

    Um…he’s wearing a chroma keyed coat. Surely you’ve seen this technology used at least 100 times in the last week. Virtually no movie, advertisement, television show, or anything else involving video lacks this technique nowdays, and the basic idea has existed since…I don’t even know, the 1950s? Earlier?

    I guess here in this video it seems to be portrayed as optical camouflage, but its really just a weather man on his day off.

  4. SignOfZeta says:

    “This is not ‘green screen’ or chroma key. It is an old story though. Essentially there’s a video camera behind the guy and a projector shooting video from that camera in front of him. It’s a long way from being a true ‘invisibility cloak’.”

    Thats what I sort of thought at first, but if that is the case, where is the camera, and how does it manage to optain the same depth of field as the camera shooting the footage? The images line up almost perfectly…

    Of course the fact that they are almost perfectly lined up, and not actually perfectly line up, would seem to indicate that its not a chroma key trick…

  5. Chris says:

    Hmmm, they seem to have changed the tech since last time I read about this. But chroma key or ‘green screen’ cannot be seen with the naked eye. In other words, if you’re in the TV studio with the weather man, you’ll still see the green (or blue) screen behind him. You have to look at the TV to see the map behind him. This technology seems to do it live and in person. I’m not sure how they’re getting the shot of what’s behind him, but I know the picture is being projected onto him. His coat is specially designed to reflect that picture back to your eyes.

  6. Dave M. says:

    Sorry, this story is about 2 years old. It was shown on Fresh Gear back when TechTV was still a station on my cable box.

    You guys need to stop using Digg as the only source of info for your stories. Most of the stories on Digg are pretty old ones rehashed.

  7. Dan Collins says:

    That was a good slam back Steve at someone who probably did nothing today to entertain anyone but himself.Dean Ing wrote a action novel with an airplane that used this technology for stealth about 10 years ago.He also wrote another novel that discussed ultra miniture aircraft for spying cropdusting and other industrial uses.Its plot had Israel trying to steal it from a private company.The flying machines were more like insects than airplanes.Could our Gov.be developing this and not talking about it?

  8. SignOfZeta says:

    “Hmmm, they seem to have changed the tech since last time I read about this. But chroma key or ‘green screen’ cannot be seen with the naked eye.”

    You aren’t seeing it with the naked eye, you are seeing a video, just like the rest of us.

  9. Eideard says:

    Couldn’t stay away, eh?

  10. Sounds The Alarm says:

    Now Paul, I would habe thought you were a McCarthy fan?

    In the guilty little secrets pile, I have an original pair of X-Ray glasses from the back of an Archie comic.


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