Zer0 wrote:But back to the main point. OK, that's cool/ingenius, whatever, but givemn the way it's presented, the only time they'll be able to use that technology is in a theater specially equipped with a goddam klieg flash.
$100 dollar photo flash.
A microcontroller with a receiver tuned to the hearing aid frequency to pick up an encoded signal in the soundtrack to trigger the flash.
Fold-flat cardboard and plastic enclosure with the logo cut out, reflective coating, can be made cheap.
All it has to do is throw bright light in one direction. Doesn't have to be all smooth and sophisticated like for fashion photography, just bright and short.
Fedex, with illustrated instructions as to how to place it in the theater. I've heard of more expensive promotion campaigns.
Prototypes made from off-the-shelf parts always look insanely complicated and expensive. Streamline that sucker. Have it knocked out by a factory in China, could come in at only a few hundred bucks, maybe less, per kit. If each one, used over the few months the thing still has novelty value, sells only a single Motorrad...
Not to mention that the brand awareness the media coverage and internet buzz over such a campaign would create will, compared to paid advertising, probably dwarf BMWs advertising budget.
The next step will be promotional campaigns by discotheques ("spot the secret code, get a drinks voucher!" or some shit) and speed-traps equipped with a similar gadget telling drivers to "Slow down." Eventually, someone will come up with a clever flash device that can produce a different message, electronically controlled, with each flash, and doesn't need a big cutout thing. Clever lenses and stuff. For a while, it will be popular at weddings. Eventually, only the paparazzi will use it, to somehow get the attention/a photogenic reaction out of a celebrity ("Hey, who set his flash to calling me a dirty slut?!?!").
When the technology becomes cheap enough, it will have a brief resurgence for amateur photographers, but that fad will taper out, until it becomes cheaper still and turns to standard equipment on some cheapo cameras and cellphone cameras.
Eventually, a children's toy and something you find on every corner in vice dens, strip clubs, red-light districts and, of course, Vegas.
It will fade into the background noise of the stuff that get's pumped into our heads directly, just one more annoying way of catching our attention and selling us shit. We will reminisce about the days when this was cool and impressive. You know, like bullet-time, birthday cards that play a tune, all that crap.
) could surely find applications for it. You probably don't need the theatre or the darkness, a camera flash leaves leaves an afterimage even in broad daylight. This seems neat here because it's done like a magic trick but when you crash your motorcycle into a wall because some asshole covertly flashed you an ad for his strip joint you'll curse these clever fucks with your last breath.