Friday Watch: X-Ray specs
By - October 29, 2004
by Doug Millison for SiliconValleyWatcher.com
At the back of the comic books I enjoyed as a boy, the two advertisements that intrigued me the most were the one for a body-building course that would make me the object of admiration for a bevy of beach beauties, and the "X-Ray" spectacles that promised to let me see through my admirers' bikinis.
I never did bulk up like the Muscle Beach boys, but now it seems the school-boy dream of X-Ray spectacles has come true:
A third party developer in Tokyo, Yamada Denshi, has developed an add-on to Vodafone handsets, intended to be used as a night filter to allow Big Red's customers to take pictures with their phones in the dark.Unfortunately, the night vision camera has an unexpected side effect - in the right circumstances, it allows users to see a lot more than they bargained for. As well as taking snaps in the dark, the Yamada Denshi infrared filter sees through people's clothes.
When attached to a high-end camera, the device can give the effect of seeing through some garments – it depends on how easily infrared can penetrate the fabric in question - and is reportedly particularly effective on dark bikinis.
Answering your next question, the device only works with one kind of Vodaphone handset available only in Japan.
Vodaphone is, incredibly, insisting that they would never put on the market a telephone with the ability to view other people naked.
I expect they'll come to a different, more profit-minded judgement, after the discovery percolates for awhile in Vodaphone's new product development and marketing organizations.
Link:
Peeping Tom filter lets phones see through bikinis by Jo Best, Silicon.com, October 25 2004
By - October 29, 2004 | Permalink | Comment
| Category: Friday Watch
| SVW Toolbar | SVW Newsletter | SVW Mobile
- NEW STORIES:
- Intel Experiment Could Save Millions in Data Center Power Costs
- Will East Coast Flood West Coast in Search of Jobs?
- GOOG Founders Could Buy All US Newspapers and Still Have $12bn
- Microsoft in Bay Area Recruiting Blog Sites for AdCenter Ad Network
- Silicon Valley Rocks! Charity Event for Local Schools
- Fishwrap: Changing Media and PR . . . Plus a Great Pep Talk
- Top of my 2008 Watch: Berlin Based Plista . . . and Online Dopplegangers
- The "Experiential Gap" . . . and the Growing Cosmos of Twitter Applications
- FT Anger on AIG Bailout
- Shift Happens . . . A Visit With One of My Favorite PR Companies
Comments (1)
After, like you, seeing for many years those google-eyed see-thru glasses ads in the backs of comic books, I finally managed to steal a pair of those glasses from a cheesy gag store in downtown Memphis when I was a kid.
Here's how they "worked": between two flimsy sheets of acetate in each lense was sandwiched a one-inch piece of flat white plastic in the shape of a human femur, which is what you saw superimposed on virtutally anything you looked at with those glasses on.
It was, for me, a great revelation to discover that things like trees, buildings, and even the very air itself contained skeletal structures within them; but alas, it did nothing to salve my salubrious adolescent peeping-Tom cravings.
Posted: November 3, 2004 4:34 PM