Guy Cramer is not a magician; he’s not even a formally trained scientist.
But he claims a new camouflage material his company is developing can essentially turn soldiers, tanks and other military vehicles and weaponry invisible.
It’s called adaptive camouflage, and it’s just the latest development to come out of Cramer’s Maple Ridge company, Hyperstealth Biotechnology Corp.
“We call it quantum stealth,” Cramer said. “If you saw the movie Predator, that’s the idea.”
Cramer is limited in how much he can say or demonstrate because the mainstay of his business is with military organizations around the world. In other words, it’s classified.
But essentially what adaptive camouflage does is bend light, similar to the way in which fibre optics bend light. A person or tank cloaked in light-bending “metamaterial” would essentially stream light around it, so that a person – or army – would literally see right past the object and would see only what is behind the camouflaged subject.
If Cramer can demonstrate that his adaptive camouflage has practical applications for the military, it would make the high-tech camouflage he now makes seem quaint.
“We’ve almost made our own technology obsolete,” he said.
Jeff Young, a professor at the University of British Columbia’s physics and astronomy department, said the difficulty in bending light waves depends on the wavelength. Coming up with a material that bends visible light will be more of a challenge than, say, bending the radio waves picked up by radar, because the wavelengths are longer.
“It’s a much bigger challenge in the visible [light spectrum],” Young said.
Cramer’s is not the only company working on bending light. Several universities and labs claim to have demonstrated some form of light bending. The challenge will be becoming the first to develop practical applications.
Cramer is also working on Smartcamo, which uses a small electrical charge to change the colour of a fabric as the background changes.
Incredible though some of his work might seem, what is perhaps even more incredible is that Cramer has no formal training in science or engineering. Then again, neither did his grandfather, Donald Hings, the man who invented the walkie-talkie. After graduating high school, Cramer spent about six years as an apprentice with his grandfather in his electronics R&D lab, Electronic Labs of Canada.
With a handful of investors, Cramer founded his own company in 1999. Its principal focus was developing a new kind of hyperbaric chamber (used to treat scuba divers suffering from the bends). He also developed a passive negative ion generator based on electrochemical reactions.
Neither invention took off at the time.
Meanwhile, after the Canadian military spent a small fortune on a new camouflage pattern (a now-common pixilated pattern), Cramer declared he could come up with something better and much cheaper.
In 2003, with a $100 software program and a formula based on fractal equations, he came up with a pattern that, he said, more closely replicates patterns in nature and is therefore more effective at concealment.
“At a tactical distance, the brain is actually perceiving branches, or leaves or bushes,” Cramer said.
He posted the camouflage pattern on the Internet and got a call from Jordan’s military office, which ordered Cramer’s camouflage for 300,000 uniforms.
“That got us back into drawing a revenue back into the company,” Cramer said.
Cramer and an assistant create a wide variety of camouflage patterns for a variety of military organizations around the world, from Canada and the U.S. to Afghanistan. Close to two million uniforms and 3,000 military vehicles in several countries use Hyperstealth camouflage designs.
Cramer has also worked with W.L. Gore to develop a camouflage called Optifade for deer hunters. Gore worked with an animal vision expert to determine how ungulates see, and Cramer came up with a pattern that makes the wearer virtually invisible to deer.
“They tested this in the field, and they’re saying the deer can’t see them at all,” Cramer said.
Hyperstealth recently landed a deal to provide the pattern for the Afghan National Army, Civil Order Police and border guard through a licensing agreement with a U.S.-based company.
After more than a decade, Hyperstealth’s 126 investors (including family and friends) are finally seeing a return on investment.
“We were able to pay a dividend to the shareholders for the first time last year,” Cramer said. •