As we quickly approach the third year of the Covid-19 pandemic, travelling the world remains a challenge. To help avoid the cabin fever, Alex Shakespeare built a fake window for himself, simulating real-time views from different cities around the world, but how to control it may be the best part.

As LCD and OLED displays become larger, with better color reproduction and impressive resolution, this makes it almost impossible for the human eye to see a single pixel, when you look at the screen or when you “look again” The real world outside the window. As early as 2014, Royal Caribbean even began to install an 80-inch 4K screen in the windowless cabin of its Quantum Ocean cruise ship, so that travelers with limited budgets can simulate what happens outside the ship through live broadcast. Camera.

Therefore, Shakespeare is far from the first hardware hacker to turn a huge flat-panel display into a fake window, but he did come up with a novel way to change the view provided by the window. A map of the world hung on a nearby wall with illuminated LED lights in five different cities, including Amsterdam and Las Vegas. No need to get a TV remote or laptop, just relocate a small magnetic plane in any of the five cities on the map to update the view of the window, thanks to streaming each one throughout the day Camera with live view of the city.

Shakespeare took the false window effect further to make it look more realistic. Mounted on the ceiling above the map is a thermal imager that can track the movement and position of the person standing in front of it. When they move from side to side, the view on the screen moves slightly from side to side, creating a parallax effect that reflects the feeling of looking out of the actual window. When the weather turns bad, Shakespeare's creation is better than a real window. He can simply reposition the plane and replace the scenery with a more pleasant and pleasant city.