Image from: Scapelab

This one’s been around for about a year, but I haven’t seen any new announcements on it yet.  Still, the idea of being able to obscure something from a distance is a valuable one.  Imagine if you were viewing the world through a VR or AR setup of some kind and a beam like the one they postulate here could be used to obscure things in your vision.  Corporate censorship?  Glorified IRL advert blocker?  Parental controls?  MURDER?

http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.0057