Invisibility cloaks and talking cars: welcome to the world of tomorrow

Despite all the economic woes besetting the UK and other western countries, technological research continues to bear fruit, delivering innovations that will help businesses and society in general overcome many of the challenges they face.

Take, for example, the research into so-called energy harvesting being done at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Teddington, Middlesex, where scientists are looking into how vibration, movement and sound can be captured and transformed into electrical power using piezoelectric materials – materials that enable a voltage to be generated by mechanical stress.

One local council has already used piezoelectric materials within a pavement to generate enough energy through pedestrians walking on it to power its street lighting, bringing the cost of powering electricity on that road to virtually zero.

"Energy harvesting is a way for industry and government to capture wasted energy and use it to make existing processes more efficient or for new applications such as wireless sensor networks," said Laurie Winkless, a higher research scientist at NPL.

"It can also help individuals to be more energy efficient, saving them money as well as contributing to the fight against climate change."

Meanwhile in Italy, scientists are working on new in-car technology that could lead to far fewer crashes. A team at the University of Bologna has developed software that lets cars communicate with one another. Vehicles "talk" to each other via acceleration sensors that trigger an alarm message in abnormal conditions such as when a car is involved in a crash.

Tests suggest it could reduce motorway pile-ups by 40 per cent, and car manufacturer Toyota is already set to carry out road tests of the software in August 2011 in Los Angeles.

Back in the UK, a team at The University of Southampton is carrying out work that could result in another boon for the transport industry and drivers in general. It has developed an intelligent transport system (ITS) that uses cutting-edge sensing, computing and communications technology to monitor and improve traffic flow.

The technology allows a local authority's traffic control office to vary the timings of traffic lights. Using artificial intelligence and the mathematical modelling of road traffic, the technology can bring traffic flow to its optimum, thus decreasing congestion and traffic jams.

Elsewhere in the UK, scientists are well on the way to developing a technology that has until now only existed in the realms of pulp fiction: an invisibility cloaking device.

By exploring the connection between geometry and light, scientists at Scotland's University of St Andrews and Masaryk University in the Czech Republic have created a cloak that is made out of materials that bend light rays so that anything inside the cloak is hidden.

"Invisibility has fascinated people for millennia," said professor Ulf Leonhardt, a scientist working on the project.

"Technology that enables invisibility has very obvious applications in the defence, aviation and medical industries but it goes far beyond that."

From technology that deceives the eye, we move to an innovation designed to help the visually impaired. At the University of Oxford, boffins are developing glasses that help people with very bad eyesight see using smartphone technology.

The glasses use a small, sophisticated computer that has an ARM Cortex chip, cameras and LED lights.

The glasses illuminate what is in front of the wearer in such an intense way that they can see some of what is in front of them. The computer behaves like a small robot, seeking out objects of interest and presenting them in a simplified way to the wearer.