MUMBAI: Thanks to a group of German scientists who created a three-dimensional "invisibility cloak" that can hide objects by bending light waves, the magical cloak that featured in the Harry Potter series has become closer to reality.

The scientists are from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany and Imperial College London.

"It's kind of like hiding a small object underneath a carpet -- except this time the carpet also disappears," a spokesman of the group said.

"We put an object under a microscopic structure, a little like a reflective carpet," said Nicholas Stenger, one of the researchers who worked on the project adding, "when we looked at it through a lens and did spectroscopy no matter what angle we looked at the object from, we saw nothing. The bump became invisible," added Stenger.

The "cloak" hid an object from detection using light of wavelengths close to those that are visible to humans.

Now, the boffins are working to recreate the disappearing bump but on a larger scale.