The gold fibres in the uniform, the product of years of
research, don't actually do that communications work yet.
Currently, they're "too thick for a uniform," Joannopoulos tells
Wired.com: They're about a millimetre in diameter, and Joannopoulos
wants to scale down to 100 microns. Joannopoulos' team plans on
spending the next 10 years testing and refining the concept and the
design further. He and a team at the US Army's Soldier Systems
Center at Natick, Massachusetts, created the garment using dummy
fibres as a proof-of-concept that the fibres could be woven into a
jacket without damaging them.
The fibres could make identifying friendly soldiers on a
confusing, smoky, dusty, dark battlefield easier. Shine a laser
designator on someone you don't recognise. If she's wearing the
same uniform as you, the functional microfibers sewn into it would
sense the laser and send a data signal back to your shirt. Same
with someone's voice. Heat-sensitive fibres show potential for
battlefield medicine: the shape and rate of change of a heat
pattern pressed up against the shirt indicate where and how
severely someone's been wounded.
