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Lancewen

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its big enough for an adult, :thumbs_up :thumbs_up

 

Do you have anymore information on this structure? Like how much such a thing would cost? I tried to search for it but came up with a different one and still no information was provided. Also I like yours better than the one I found.

 

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Mercedes With Cloaking Device

 

 

In the latest Mercedes commercial, one side of this F-Cell car has a camera recording the scenery it passes, while the other side displays that scenery on a field of LEDs, effectively letting you see through the car.

 

Below is also a YouTube video that goes with the picture above.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ZIGzpi9lCck

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Mercedes With Cloaking Device

...

is that real?

I’m certain, from watching the video, that this is real, and while head-turningly cool, no more than a clever use of off-the shelf technology to make a head-turningly cool effect, not a system that can actually fool a person into not seeing the car, from any angle.

 

As this system uses a single camera, it doesn’t even quite fool another camera capturing an image exactly in line with the car’s single camera. Notice in any still picture of it how only one section of the image aligns correctly with the background - strait-line features like trees and poles don’t line-up correctly except for at best one place – and how anything close to the camera – like a kid mugging for the camera – appears much bigger than it should. Under the right daylight or night conditions, I expect the system be effective camouflage against, say, a featureless field of grass or snow, but then again, so can a simple camouflage paint,

 

I recall hearing of interest in a similar technology to make war machines and soldiers invisible to specific self-guided weapons and night-vision equipment, and have heard unconfirmed reports of success with this, but believe that those systems are designed to work in infrared, not visible, light ranges most weapons and vision devices use.

 

While it certainly draws attention to Mercedes’s product, and has a clever “a hydrogen fuel cell electric car is ‘invisible’ to the environment” theme, I’m not sure this gimmick, no matter how cool and clever, is effective advertising, as people tend to remember just the cars “invisiblity”, not anything about the car itself, such as the fact that it has a 650 km / 400 mi range on a single filling of hydrogen gas, has ordinary car speed (electronically limited to 170 km/hr / 110 MPH), handling, and sturdiness, emits nothing but water vapor, and 3 of them were driven around the world (90,000 km) in 70 days in 2011 without a mechanical problem (other than needing repair for a substantial axle and body damage from a collision with another car (not due to any cloaking device hijinks – the round-the-world car was bright florescent green-yellow, not LED covered)). Of course, since hydrogen gas is hard to find every 500 km or so, the little cars had to be accompanied by a fleet of gas service vehicles to handle shipped-in tanked hydrogen (most of it most likely made from reforming natural gas) for most stops of the trip, and on at least one occasion where the hydrogen delivery scheme failed, had to hauled in a car-carrying van when the drivers and passengers of one of the cars drove too fast and failed to make it to a planned fuel stop, but these are infrastructure, not car engineering, problems.

 

(see this and this autoblog.com story for more[/url])

 

Almost forgot this thread’s supposed to have cool pics, so here’s one of the F-cell’s instrument panel, from the above article:

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Almost forgot this thread’s supposed to have cool pics, so here’s one of the F-cell’s instrument panel, from the above article:

 

Straight comments about cool pictures are also appreciated especially when they add cool content. It seems like progress is being made on a real

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