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"Science fiction is what scientists would do if they could - if they had enough grant money, enough time, and enough brains to do the wonderful things they would like to do."
- Greg Bear

Optical-Effect Suit  
  An invisibility garment.  

This is a fairly early presentation of this idea; William Gibson updates the concept in his mimetic polycarbon suit from his 1984 novel Neuromancer.

I pulled the door wide, took out a limp, fish-scale textured coverall with heavy fittings moulded into the fabric at the small of the back and at the ankles. I pulled off my jacket, struggled into the garment: it was called an optical-effect suit, and it was one of the CBI’s best-kept secrets. It had the unusual property of absorbing some wavelengths of light and re-emitting them in the infrared, reflecting others in controlled patterns. It was auto-tuned over the entire visible spectrum, and was capable of duplicating any background pattern short of a clan Ginsberg tartan. I couldn’t walk down a crowded avenue in it without causing a few puzzled stares, but in any less crowded setting, it was as close an approximation of a cloak of invisibility as science had come up with.
Technovelgy from The Hounds of Hell, by Keith Laumer.
Published by IF in 1964
Additional resources -

Compare to the scramble suit from A Scanner Darkly (1977) by Philip K. Dick, the mimetic polycarbon suit from Neuromancer (1984) by William Gibson and the abglanz from The Mountain in the Sea (2022) by Ray Naylor.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from The Hounds of Hell
  More Ideas and Technology by Keith Laumer
  Tech news articles related to The Hounds of Hell
  Tech news articles related to works by Keith Laumer

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