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Hyperstealth invisible cloak2/19/2024 “This is potentially the first large market scale big play that metamaterials has had,” says Prof Smith. With wholesale prices at about $25,000 per terminal, the product remains out of reach for most, but prices will come down in the future, says Nathan Kundtz, Kymeta’s chief executive and a former graduate student of Prof Smith’s. The company began selling terminals with these lighter antennas in December, to allow cars, trains, yachts and other forms of transport to connect to the internet via satellite.Įventually Kymeta hopes even individual consumers would consider purchasing a satellite terminal for internet access, rather than using cellular networks. Metamaterials allow Kymeta to make antennas lighter and more portable than conventional satellite dishes. It has since raised more than $200m in funding, with investors including Bill Gates. Kymeta Corporation, which sells satellite antennas made from metamaterials, was the first company to spin off from Intellectual Ventures in 2012. Despite the impact, if you don’t have applications coming out, the field could still die, so I turned my attention to working closely with Intellectual Ventures.” ![]() “After we did the cloaking, my feeling was that couldn’t do more in academics,” says Prof Smith. In 2013 he took a sabbatical from Duke University to help establish the Metamaterials Commercialization Center within the business. Prof Smith began working with Intellectual Ventures, a Washington-based company, in 2008 in order to create products using metamaterials. ![]() “It is a time when starting to emerge from their research or stealth development phases and ship general availability products.” “These are the earliest pushes,” says Tom Driscoll, chief technology officer of Echodyne, which makes radar for drones, one of the products that uses the emerging technology. These commercial uses may be less headline-grabbing than an invisibility shield, but they show that metamaterials are coming out of the lab and into everyday use. Because certain metamaterials can control electromagnetic waves, they can also be used to improve the performance of satellite antennas and sensors. Now, the same technology is starting to be used in a number of commercial products. ![]() David Smith, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke University, who was a co-author of the research, went on to produce the first functioning cloak - although it made objects invisible to microwaves rather than to visible light. Metamaterials first captured the public imagination in 2006, when John Pendry of Imperial College published two papers showing how to create a Harry Potter-style invisibility cloak using the specially engineered materials. Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
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