Perhaps the days of you taking pictures at famous tourist sites are coming to an end. Imagine going to the Eiffel Tower or Golden Gate Bridge and having "Image copyright violation" written across the center? Then you're forced to go buy a picture without the ruining image running across your camera. Think it sounds like a flight of fancy? Not anymore.
Welcome to the "Image Fulgurator."
An excerpt from the Wired article:
To see why, consider how it works. The device is a modified camera -- in this case, an old manual Minolta SLR. A flashgun fires through the camera in reverse, from the back. The flash picks up the image of a slide inside and projects it out through the lens and onto any surface.
The trick is in the triggering. The Fulgurator lies in wait until an unsuspecting photographer takes a picture using a flash. When the device's sensor sees this flash, it fires its own unit, throwing up an image which is captured by the hapless photographer's camera while remaining unseen by the naked eye.
Now, imagine for a moment that an ad agency gets hold of this. You couldn't take a photograph of a tourist attraction ever again without worrying that some marketing crap would be pushed into your camera. As Julius told me, "I see it as a piece of media art. It could be a dangerous attack on media. [But] if people do shit with it, I feel bad."
Think they're lying? Take a look.
See what I mean?
And invented by a quirky German named von Bismarck. Awesome.
