A Wider Net

I just learned about kameraflage, a company/technology/technique that creates images that can only be seen through digital cameras. This has some very interesting applications for marketing, communications, and exhibit design.

For starters, check out their applications page, which covers some great ideas right off the bat. In this section, they illustrate how to use the hidden messages as captioning for the hearing impaired. This way, no special devices need to be handed out. The drawback of having to watch through a camera may be acceptable for short presentations.

They also illustrate hidden billboards - an idea I once had using lasers and special filtering paper glasses. This one is far cooler since it relies on technology that almost everyone carries with them. You can use this to create hidden messages that act as billboards, as shown in the illustration below, or are used as part of a scavenger hunt for kids at a theme park or grown-up-kids at a corporate outing.

And finally, they illustrate garments with hidden images or messages that only appear when shot through a camera.

Not shown is a sort of copy protection, which would prevent people from videotaping or photographing a movie, exhibitor or concert.

I also wonder if someone will use this for some dirty fun by projecting images on a stage at, say, a political rally that can only be seen by the thousands of digital cameras in the crowd.

I’m not sure how available this technology is or, for that matter, how proprietary it is. Regardless, the idea of projecting images that can only be detected with a camera phone sounds pretty cool to me.