Movie Pirates Targeted with IR Light

Those cam torrents you’ve been downloading may soon be a thing of the past. The National Institute of Informatics in Japan in co-operation with Sharp, have developed a way to prevent camcorders from recording theatre screens.

The technique involves blasting pulses of IR light through holes in the theater screen. The holes are already there for sound to pass through. The IR light creates blinding flashes and renders the video too blurry to watch. Teams conducting the research says 10 pulses per second is the optimum number, where video gets blurred yet the human eye can’t see them.

Great, now not only do you have to put up with, shaky cams, audience noise, bobbing heads and poor audio, you now have to deal with blurry video too.

Oh, and just in case you were interested…the damage caused by bootleg film recordings is estimated at around 3 billion dollars a year, according to the American Film Institute.

[Via fareastgizmos]