If you were "cloaked" by bending light around yourself, could you still see out?

No - you wouldn't be able to see out. Light would shift JUST before it hit you and would warp around your figure - which means that no photons would hit your eyes, leaving you in total darkness.

The only way to do it would be to allow a very limited amount of light to hit your pupils - which would make them slightly visible - and would allow you to see as if in twilight.

This is WAY interesting!!

You see by light reaching you from another source. If that light had bent around you it wouldn't reach you so you couldn't see out.

Try wrapping yourself in aluminium foil (which does reflect light) and you will get the idea.

So some portion of the light has to reach you for you to see.

In the aluminium sheet I described you could make occasional tiny holes that you could see through.

As long as the fraction of the light passing through these holes is small then it would have negligible impact on your disguise.

Now any cloak that permitted a small fraction of light to reach you would have the same properties but it would no longer be "invisible". Now it would become "heavily camouflaged" instead.

By the way, one approach (which isn't very successful) could be to have millions of tiny cameras and millions of tiny screens. The light reaching a camera on one side could be amplified and sent the the screen on the other side.

In this way the losses of viewing the light are made good by the gain of the amplifier.

But a quick look at the optics shows why it must fail for anything but one observer in one location.

You might be right, if the visible light is bent around you, it can't reach your eye. Maybe some type of pinhole camera extruding out of the "cloak" could give you vision on a monitor. Some of these cameras could be extremely tiny, but still visible and might give your position away.

I just seen an article the other day on this very subject. I'll see if I can locate it. Here's something similar:

Invisibility cloak that generates virtual images gets closer to realization

http://www.physorg.com/news189418826.html

Invisibility: After several years of research, it's just gotten weirder

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id...

i'm too dense for mild to flee...i'm going to pull it in with my gravitational field and suck it in to the oblivion of my super mass that lies over the form horizon previous illumination perpetually muaaah ha ha