There is no easy way to redirect or absorb photons, because photons are actually elements of the electromagnetic field. Photons are little disturbances in the electromagnetic field. These disturbances are caused by electrons moving close to protons. The charge differential between the electron and proton becomes strong enough in compressed space to generate a disturbance in the overall electromagnetic field, this disturbance propagates at the speed of c out from the point at which it was produced. Those little disturbances impact our eyes and are “light” because they carry information about their origin point, including wavelength and frequency information. Also directional vector information. So the brain can combine all of that information across half a billion photons impacting the cornea every second, and from that the brain derives a picture of the outside world.
Think about waves in a pond. How would you redirect or absorb them? Well you really can’t. The pond waves dissipate over time (distance) because of friction. But there is no friction in the electromagnetic field. So light waves just keep going. Like physical bodies in space. But physics bodies in space can be redirected.
If you generate an electromagnetic field or a gravity field you can redirect objects in space. Objects in space are macro scale compared to the underlying background general level electromagnetic field. But photons are part of that background EM field.
However, photons do get absorbed by mediums. That’s why you can’t see forever. The air absorbs them. And before totally absorbing them it scatters them, making distant objects blurry. Also this reduces the number of photons down to a minimum needed for us to see the object at a distance due to all of the background scattering of photons already present.
So we need to find a way to produce a medium that absorbs enough photons around our bodies. That way we can become invisible. But that would mean we couldn’t see either.
So make two holes in the medium, for our eyes to see out of. This would be like a cloak of compressed air around our bodies with two eye holes in it. Sometimes people report seeing two floating eyes, maybe that’s what this is.
The brain tends to normalize so any outlier or unfamiliar information is likely to get normalized away and not register consciously. Also the two openings could be refined down to funnels that end at exactly the diameter of the pupil, and that end changes size depending on the size of the pupil, so really all that would be visible to anyone else would be two black spots floating in the air. Probably enough of a subtle anomaly for the brain to normalize it out of conscious awareness.
So how would we use EM or some other means to gather air around ourselves in compressed layers enough to turn ourselves invisible to others? And use computer control to modulate that to allow for eye holes? We would need to project a force of some kind. It’s possible that a very strong EM field could do this. Very strong EM fields do have an impact on non-magnetic bodies. The air has molecules in it that are not electromagnetically symmetrical, for example water vapor. H2O is electromagnetically non-symmetrical which is why water tends to break up and dissolve things. The H2O molecules rotate and bounce around.
Strong EM fields would therefore have an impact on water. Probably other molecules or atoms in the air would also be affected. Therefore producing a very strong EM field around oneself might cause a lot of the stuff in the air around us to compress within that field, forming a dense layer around us. We would be seen by others to first become hazy like we were far away, and then we would disappear as the field compressed enough air around us to absorb enough photons such that not enough photons emit from our body to make us visible to others.
The field would need to be very strong and very small in distance. So incredible strength that tapers off quickly. But we would be very close to the field, inside of it; that means the H2O and other things in our bodies would also be affected. Probably why Tesla quit the Philadelphia experiment. He knew it was too dangerous for the soldiers on that ship.
But if you could make a donut shaped field, a field with a center inside that had no EM... that would work to be safe. So basically we just need to find out a way to produce very strong donut shape fields of EM. Just not so strong that it warps spacetime and... unless you want to time travel or something.