Page 14 - IAV Digital Magazine #449

iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine
Fake Shadow-Boxer Helps Single Japanese Women Feel Safer At Home
By Reuters, Kwlyeon Ha
TOKYO (Reuters) - Behind the apartment’s cur- tain, a tough guy is boxing, throwing left and right hooks and jabs, and lung- ing forward, 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 man- agement com- pany hopes will help protect and reassure women living by them- selves.
Still in the proto- type stage,
“Man on the Curtain” uses a smartphone connected to a projector to throw a moving shadow of a man doing vari- ous energetic activities onto a curtain.
Customers can choose from a dozen different
scenarios that show their man boxing, doing karate and even swinging a baseball bat.
To mix things up a bit, the man can calm down and do more mundane things like get dressed, chill out with a guitar or even
do some vacu- uming around the flat.
The system was developed for security at build- ings run by Leopalace21 Corp,, said Keiichi Nakamura, manager of the firm’s advertis- ing department.
Queries from the public prompted the company to think bigger and consider offering it for sale. But some people have had doubts about how effec- tive it might be, said Nakamura.
In particular,
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.
“If projecting a shadow makes a woman an easy target by showing crimi- nals there’s nobody home, that would put the cart before the horse,” he said.
“So we’d like to commercialize it once we add variety, such as releasing a new video every day.”
iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine