I was thinking about those outfits celebrities wear that mess with flash photography equipment, and I was watching a dude on TV just now whose shirt pattern was going apeshit because of the camera, and I wondered if there could ever be a pattern or material that, when filmed, caused the camera irreversible damage. And if that were physically possible, I wondered if intentionally showing up to camera-heavy events wearing said shirt would constitute a crime on my part.
It’s just a shirt after all. It’s not like I’m grabbing a camera and smashing it on the ground. But at the same time, I know it will have that effect, so I’m accountable. But it’s not like my shirt is emitting damaging laser beams or anything, it’s entirely passive.
Also, is there anything like this scenario in real life/law?
What you describe is simply not possible with a passive material. Funnily your example of something shooting lasers is probably the only thing that could come close to actual damage
The most you can do is one of those adversarial patterns that just confuses the white balance and autofocus. There is nothing you can do to affect someone shooting in manual mode
If you could damage a camera by pointing it at something, the manufacturer would fix the issue before selling it, because no one is buying a camera that does.
Rick and Morty did this once, Rick simply put on a hat with a QR code that made a robot army recognize him as a high level commander.
A few days ago I read a short story,
comp.basilisk.faqby David Langford, which sketched a world in which specific images could irreversibly crash the brain, leading to a full scale worldwide ban on images on the internet and many other places as well. The story postulated hundreds of potential info-hazards with many of them simple enough to be applied via stencil and spray paint. Two of them are branch families of the Mandelbrot set ‘and no we won’t tell you where, do not look’Other examples;
“Keep your eyes peeled or we’ll peel them for you wholesale!”
I am thinking if you could wear a mirror that would direct all the sunlight right at the camera. That would have to be an active tracking system, but wouldn’t emit any light itself.
It would have to be parabolic and yeah as you suggest you would either need a big robotic rig to aim it or you would have to be very very obvious with your intent to damage given there’s pretty much only one specific place a given parabolic mirror can be to damage something else.
Recently, there were news about the LIDAR of Volvo cars destroying camera sensors when they were aimed into the direction of the IR laser beam. Yet, this is not a passive item.
Even that was debated. No one proved it continued when you took another video, just that it broke the video of the lidar itself.
Here is a video demonstrating the lidar killing pixels in a phone camera sensor.
They also tried cameras on other vehicles but those were not affected, only the cellphone aimed directly at the lidar suffered damage.
So I tried watching it and never saw them close the camera app or restart the phone, so again, waiting on some actual proof with some science behind it rather than “dude totally said so”. That only proves that the software controlling the picture adjustments has been sent out of whack(as evidenced by the fact that it would show true colors eventually when pointed at something else). If the pixels were “dead”, they wouldn’t reset. We have a separate phrase for that. It’s “stuck pixel”.
It’s the same effect as being in a truely white lit room and everything looks orange in a camera. It’s the color correction when you shine a crazy bright light at the sensor. It assumes you’re on the sun and adjusts accordingly.