I was thinking about those outfits celebrities wear that mess with flash photography equipment, and I was watching a dude on TV just now whose shirt pattern was going apeshit because of the camera, and I wondered if there could ever be a pattern or material that, when filmed, caused the camera irreversible damage. And if that were physically possible, I wondered if intentionally showing up to camera-heavy events wearing said shirt would constitute a crime on my part.
It’s just a shirt after all. It’s not like I’m grabbing a camera and smashing it on the ground. But at the same time, I know it will have that effect, so I’m accountable. But it’s not like my shirt is emitting damaging laser beams or anything, it’s entirely passive.
Also, is there anything like this scenario in real life/law?
What you describe is simply not possible with a passive material. Funnily your example of something shooting lasers is probably the only thing that could come close to actual damage
The most you can do is one of those adversarial patterns that just confuses the white balance and autofocus. There is nothing you can do to affect someone shooting in manual mode
If you could damage a camera by pointing it at something, the manufacturer would fix the issue before selling it, because no one is buying a camera that does.
Recently, there were news about the LIDAR of Volvo cars destroying camera sensors when they were aimed into the direction of the IR laser beam. Yet, this is not a passive item.
Even that was debated. No one proved it continued when you took another video, just that it broke the video of the lidar itself.
I am thinking if you could wear a mirror that would direct all the sunlight right at the camera. That would have to be an active tracking system, but wouldn’t emit any light itself.
It would have to be parabolic and yeah as you suggest you would either need a big robotic rig to aim it or you would have to be very very obvious with your intent to damage given there’s pretty much only one specific place a given parabolic mirror can be to damage something else.
Parabolic would only work if the camera is in the focal point, so you’d need a different part of the parabola or a different parabola depending on where you are standing relative to the camera. This is in addition to the aiming mechanism.
And even then, I’m not convinced it will damage all camera techs instead of just overexposing the image or frame for some. If they just clamp the affected pixels instead of trying to maintain the relative brightness, they might be able to still see your face clearly.
You could maybe defeat LIDAR with retro reflectors or something. Probably not, but that’s the only case it’d be possible realistically, since it’s actively shooting lasers out that you could reflect back, without actually locating the camera. Anything else, yeah it’d require actively finding the camera and attacking it, since it is only receiving light. I guess if you wore something bright enough to damage any camera looking in your direction that would also work, but I don’t think it’d be considered passive, and you’d also blind everyone else who can see you, probably permanently, and it’d require huge amounts of energy.