By Daniel Rigney Just when you thought the 21st century couldn’t get any creepier, an international architectural firm has announced plans to build the world’s first invisible skyscraper in Seoul, Korea.
The concept is simple enough. Cameras take real-time images of the building’s backdrop (cloudy skies, perhaps) and transmit these to the front of the building’s reflective surface, creating an illusion of nothingness, a false semblance of corporate transparency embodied in a seemingly see-through building.
If office towers can be made invisible through this sort of high-trickery, why can’t other objects? Homes? Cars? People?
The invisible house would sell at a premium, especially in markets where privacy is a highly valued commodity (formerly a “right”). To know the house is there, you'd literally have to bump into it. If you were visiting a friend who lived in an invisible house, you’d have a devil of a time just finding the door, let alone the doorbell.
Invisible cars could be even more troublesome. Imagine the maddening frustration of trying to find your invisible car in a giant parking structure. It's already challenging enough to find a visible car.
If you were driving an invisible car, others wouldn’t know you were coming at them. (Murder, she rode?) On the other hand, if you were driving toward an invisible car, you wouldn’t know you were headed straight for danger.
Now imagine two invisible cars driving toward each other, each unseen by the other. You can guess where I’m going with this.
Invisibility has its privileges. With an invisible car you could violate traffic laws without fear of being spotted by the police. But if police themselves were driving invisible cars, and you weren’t, you wouldn’t know you were being followed until you heard the siren. Who knew that Big Brother was tailing you? And then there’s the problem of invisible people -- the prospect of sharing the planet with countless others wearing apparently transparent suits. I’m not talking about Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man invisible. Ellison’s people are visible to anyone who has eyes to see them. No, I’m talking about people whose surfaces are camouflaged by real-time camera images of their surroundings, so they blend with whatever’s around them. I’m talking about human movie screens. Camera chameleons.
Predicted future sci-fi movie line: “I don’t see people.”
But how do we know prototype invisibles aren’t already here and walking among us? Hiding in plain sight? In fact, how do you know an invisible person isn’t standing behind you right now? Don’t look!
You looked? No one was there? Can you be sure of that?
The 21st century is still young, and already our inventors are envisioning invisible objects. My greatest fear is that whoever’s inventing invisible objects now will go on to invent something even creepier in the unseen future.
Danagram
:] ... a nearly invisible presence in the blogosphere since 2011
The concept is simple enough. Cameras take real-time images of the building’s backdrop (cloudy skies, perhaps) and transmit these to the front of the building’s reflective surface, creating an illusion of nothingness, a false semblance of corporate transparency embodied in a seemingly see-through building.
If office towers can be made invisible through this sort of high-trickery, why can’t other objects? Homes? Cars? People?
The invisible house would sell at a premium, especially in markets where privacy is a highly valued commodity (formerly a “right”). To know the house is there, you'd literally have to bump into it. If you were visiting a friend who lived in an invisible house, you’d have a devil of a time just finding the door, let alone the doorbell.
Invisible cars could be even more troublesome. Imagine the maddening frustration of trying to find your invisible car in a giant parking structure. It's already challenging enough to find a visible car.
If you were driving an invisible car, others wouldn’t know you were coming at them. (Murder, she rode?) On the other hand, if you were driving toward an invisible car, you wouldn’t know you were headed straight for danger.
Now imagine two invisible cars driving toward each other, each unseen by the other. You can guess where I’m going with this.
Invisibility has its privileges. With an invisible car you could violate traffic laws without fear of being spotted by the police. But if police themselves were driving invisible cars, and you weren’t, you wouldn’t know you were being followed until you heard the siren. Who knew that Big Brother was tailing you? And then there’s the problem of invisible people -- the prospect of sharing the planet with countless others wearing apparently transparent suits. I’m not talking about Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man invisible. Ellison’s people are visible to anyone who has eyes to see them. No, I’m talking about people whose surfaces are camouflaged by real-time camera images of their surroundings, so they blend with whatever’s around them. I’m talking about human movie screens. Camera chameleons.
Predicted future sci-fi movie line: “I don’t see people.”
But how do we know prototype invisibles aren’t already here and walking among us? Hiding in plain sight? In fact, how do you know an invisible person isn’t standing behind you right now? Don’t look!
You looked? No one was there? Can you be sure of that?
The 21st century is still young, and already our inventors are envisioning invisible objects. My greatest fear is that whoever’s inventing invisible objects now will go on to invent something even creepier in the unseen future.
Danagram
:] ... a nearly invisible presence in the blogosphere since 2011
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