British company claim to have made a real-life invisibility shield

Forget Harry Potter’s cloak, a British company claim to have made a real-life invisibility shield.

London-based Invisibility Shield Co. say the fully functional shields can hide a whole person.

The firm explain the innovation uses a precision engineered lens array to direct much of the light reflected from the subject away from the observer. This sends it sideways across the face of the shield to the left and right.

From the observer's perspective, background light is effectively smeared horizontally across the front face of the shield, over the area where the subject would ordinarily be seen.

Invisibility Shield Co. say: “The shields perform at their absolute best against uniform backgrounds such as foliage, grass, rendered walls, sand, sky and asphalt.

“Backgrounds with defined horizontal lines work really well too and these can be natural features such as the horizon or man-made features like walls, rails or painted lines.”