(SMH) — Scientists in the United States have reported a further step towards a celebrated ”invisibility cloak” by masking a large, free-standing object in three dimensions.

The lab work is the latest advance in a scientific frontier that uses novel materials to manipulate light, a trick that is of huge interest to the military in particular.

Reporting in the New Journal of Physics, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin cloaked an 18-centimetre tube from light in the microwave part of the energy spectrum.