With a fifteen million dollar grant, DARPA is researching the feasibility of creating personal, self healing shields. The idea is rapidly looking to become reality thanks to “metamaterials,” a composite molecule is not only self repairing, but invisible to boot. Think of a Harry Potter like invisibility cloak that also repels a 7.62mm round from an AK47. The result hopes to be invisible body armor good for just about any combat situation that is lightweight, easy to deploy, can capable of return fire.

The invisibility is largely thanks to the composites being engineered to flow with electromagnetic waves, rather than reflect them. And the armor will self heal and keep coming back for me.

Nice in theory, but in practice, the electromagnetic bandwave is so narrow, that it’s becoming difficult to make the engineering work affordably – if at all – in the real world. But the payoffs could be enormous for preventing battlefield casualities resulting from firefights to even IED detonation.

And besides, we’re talking government procurement here, so they just toss money at the problem until they’ve solved it.

So in the future, Harry may not only be invisible under that cloak, he might be packing the business end of an M16.