Can Roman Abramovich’s new yacht Eclipse paparazzi?
Paparazzi photographers are the bane of celebrities’ lives, following them around everywhere, trying to snap shots of them both in public and private. Most have to just put up with it, accepting it as part of being famous these days. However, when you’re a billionaire and money is no object, there are solutions, one of which is to install an anti-paparazzi shield on your new yacht, Eclipse.
Roman Abramovich is a Russian oligarch who built a huge fortune from oil in Russia. He’s now worth an estimated $10 billion, although his wealth has been reduced by the current world financial crisis. Regardless, $10 billion is enough money to enable one to do pretty much anything one wants to. So Abramovich has done just that.
He bought Chelsea Football Club in 2003 and has also spent fortunes on property and vehicles. This includes the world’s biggest private jet, a Boeing 767, and a fleet of four yachts, the latest of which is called Eclipse and cost in excess of $1 billion. And for that kind of money Abramovich clearly wants the latest technology to preserve his privacy.
The Times reports how this includes an anti-paparazzi shield which uses lasers to disable any digital cameras being pointed at the vessel. Infrared lasers which survey the whole length of the yacht are able to detect the electronic light sensors in nearby cameras. When they do, they fire a focuses beam of light at the camera, essentially disrupting its ability to record an image.
Impressive stuff indeed, and more befitting a Bond villain than a Russian billionaire. Not that the two aren’t interchangeable you understand.
However, researchers at Georgia Tech university in the USA told TechRadar that the system may not actually work. They developed a similar system in 2006 but are warning that it could be useless against the types of cameras used by most professional photographers.
Professor Gregory Abowd suggested that while the system can indeed inhibit digital cameras which use charge-coupled devices, most modern SLR cameras now use CMOS instead and therefore won’t be affected by Abramovich’s new toy. So, I guess he’ll have to resort to playing with the other toys on Eclipse, which reportedly include two helipads, a mini-submarine, and a missile defense system. For shame.
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