The United States Air Force is working with Victorian researchers to develop light-bending technology which could be used to camouflage military hardware in war zones.

The US military hopes the technology could allow armies to make troops, tanks, planes and ships effectively invisible on the battlefield.

The Victorian scientists are using modelling based on mother-of-pearl to work out how to control the direction of light.

The theory is that light could be bent around objects, making them disappear.

"By learning from nature, we're able to actually arrange very small particles - we call them nanoparticles - in a very precise way, in a 3D arrangement," Deakin University Associate Professor Tiffany Walsh said.

"This 3D arrangement can be very good at scattering light in particular wavelengths, in a very unusual way, in a very unexpected way."

The breakthrough uses computer modelling at the Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative.

Associate Professor Marc R Knecht, from the University of Miami, says the work is being used by the United States Air Force.

"They're going to be using a lot of these waveguides for camouflage so that they aren't visible to the enemy on the battlefield," he said.

"The US Air Force is quite ecstatic and really excited about this project."

But Associate Professor Walsh cannot say when the US will start using the ideas in warzones.

"These ideas, if they're promising, someone else in the Air Force will take them and develop them," she said.

"I don't know what that timescale is, or who's in charge of that," she said.

She says the technology could have a wide range of practical applications, such as replacing wires in circuitry with lights, which would be a more efficient way to power computers.