The invisibility cloak, a theme that has occurred in science fiction, is now a reality, CTV News reported.

Two researchers at the University of Toronto have created an effective invisibility cloak that is thin, scalable and adaptive to different types and sizes of objects with an optical-camouflage technology.

Professor George Eleftheriades and PhD student Michael Selvanayagam have designed and tested a new approach to cloaking -- by surrounding an object with small antennas that collectively radiate an electromagnetic field. The radiated field makes the object it is covering effectively disappear from microwave and radio wave detectors by, canceling out any waves scattering off the cloaked object.

"We've taken an electrical engineering approach, but that's what we are excited about," Eleftheriades said in a statement. "It's very simple: instead of surrounding what you're trying to cloak with a thick metamaterial shell, we surround it with one layer of tiny antennas, and this layer radiates back a field that cancels the reflections from the object.

Their experimental demonstration effectively cloaked a metal cylinder from radio waves using one layer of loop antennas, according to a press release.

According to Eleftheriades, the system can be scaled up to cloak larger objects using more loops, and the loops could become printed and flat, like a blanket or skin.

Currently the antenna loops must be manually attuned to the electromagnetic frequency they need to cancel, but in future they could function both as sensors and active antennas, adjusting to different waves in real time, much like the technology behind noise-cancelling headphones.

While various attempts to create a functioning invisibility cloak have been underway since 2006, Eleftheriades believes their system has a number of advantages over past attempts. Early systems were large and clunky, the sheer size and inflexibility of the approach makes it impractical for real-world uses.

Besides obvious applications such as hiding objects or conducting surveillance operations, the cloaking technology can be used to eliminate obstacles such as "structures interrupting signals from cellular base stations. The system can also alter the signature of a cloaked object, making it appear bigger, smaller, or even shifting it in space

Their paper "Experimental demonstration of active electromagnetic cloaking" on the technology was published in the journal Physical Review X.

Click here to see how the scientists developed the invisibility cloak.