That’s basically the premise of 2020’s The Invisible Man. Not a cloak, but a full body suit. Well, really the premise was to explore “What sort of man would build such a thing?” as contrasted against the more traditional “How would becoming invisible change such a man?”
Anyway, if one could build such a suit, creating an internal HUD to allow the cameras to also display an image of what is outside of the suit would be trivial.
That’s why I liked the Predator invisibility system. It somehow (wizard?) bends light around him but it can still be seen as distortion. Functionally, it is awesome stealth. If you stay still in a complex background you’re virtually invisible. But don’t move until they’ve stopped looking at you!
As for the OP, it works the other way, too. Lets say somehow the eye still focuses light onto your retina, like most movies and TV shows do it. Then, if you saw the invisible man from the back, there are two black circles floating in space where his retinae are.
Yeah, you’d need a mesh of cameras and a mesh of little projectors so the angle and other properties of the incoming light could be preserved and reproduced on the other side. You’d also need to compute the paths of the rays in real time because it’s not as simple as just projecting everything that comes in at one point, out from the exact opposite point - for example light hitting a point on your right shoulder may have to exit from your left shoulder, or if you lean over, from your neck, or if you turn a little, from your chest, etc. Repeat for every ray of light hitting every part of the body, from every direction, taking into account the position and every small movement of every part of the body.
I’m not saying that makes it impossible, but it is a huge undertaking and is glossed over in movies and other fiction when this type of cloak is mentioned. Die Another Day, I’m looking at you.
This is where Douglas Adams got it right; you just need to project a field that makes people think the object is Somebody Else’s Problem - and they’ll never see it.
That’s how most modern fantasy stories handle invisibility - as an illusion that fools the minds of observers, either making them look the other way, making them not care or simply erasing the invisible person from their minds. It’s much easier than messing with the laws of physics.
Or like Mystery Men, where the guy could only be invisible as long as no one was looking at him.
That’s how the Sue Storm knockoff does it in PLANETARY.
This. There are many ways, conceptually, to make an object invisible, many of which don’t require interfering with the subject’s vision.
I have a book The Science of Science Fiction that goes into detail not just about blindness but also the challenge of having blood cells with the refractive index of air, concluding that invisibility is impossible. It always struck me as a “I know a thing” objection i.e. “I know a fact, so it must be relevant and critically important”.
Not to threadshit though. It’s an interesting premise for a story; of having invisibility come with the side effect of blindness. In fact, powers coming with tradeoffs, is quite underserved in general IMO.
A personal if deeply flawed favorite, The Invisible Man / I-man series (two seasons on Syfy) dealt with it. Originally, the scientists doing the work wasn’t sure how vision would be resolved or affected, but the first* human trials showed that a side effect of the process “shifted” the spectrum of light seen to outside the normal visible spectrum (presumably UV). Of course, that means the subject IS also visible in the UV and IR spectrums, which is a point anytime they want the protagonist to have to struggle more.
(*) - more be spoilers, but not worried much for a tv series from 2000. It’s free to watch on the Roku channel, and I find it fun, so I won’t go further.