Behind the apartment’s curtain, a tough guy is boxing, enough to make any passing criminal think twice before breaking in.
The image is nothing more than a projected shadow, but one that a Japanese apartment management company hopes will help protect and reassure women living by themselves.
Still in the prototype stage, “Man on the Curtain” uses a smartphone connected to a projector to throw a moving shadow of a man doing various energetic activities onto a curtain.
According to Reuters, customers can choose from a dozen different scenarios that show their man boxing, doing karate and even swinging a baseball bat.
The user can also make the image do things like get dressed, chill out with a guitar or even vacuum around the flat.
Keiichi Nakamura, manager of Leopalace21 Corp, the firm’s advertising department, said that the system was developed for security at buildings run by his company.
Queries from the public prompted the company to think bigger and consider offering it for sale, despite some people’s doubts about how effective it might be, he added.
Criminals might sooner or later work out that a “man behind the curtain” who spends his whole time shadow-boxing, actually means a woman is alone inside, Nakamura noted.
“If projecting a shadow makes a woman an easy target by showing criminals there’s nobody home, that would put the cart before the horse. So we’d like to commercialize it once we add variety, such as releasing a new video every day,” he explained.
