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Comment by vasco | Hacker News Reader

By far the most common usage in the real world is in camouflaging prototype cars while being tested on the road https://www.bmw.com/en/automotive-life/prototype-cars.html

This way paparazzi can take pictures but it's hard to distinguish the shapes.

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I think they also sometimes wrap polystyrene blocks under the camouflage too, so that particular curves on e.g. the wings or nose etc are altered by virtue of the camouflage having to confirm over that too.

I was about to say, dazzle camouflage seems just about perfect for doing 3d scanning on, so many nice high contrast areas for measuring stereo disparity!

Yeah absolutely this. I think in "the old days" a decade or two ago that sort of thing would have been largely out of reach to all but the most determined/well-founded adversary (I'm thinking corporate espionage, magazines etc, not nation states checking out the new Merc etc).

But now probably pretty much anyone in their bedroom could do it in a few hours. Literally next post after this one is for https://vgg-t.github.io/

That's really interesting. The times I've seen Toyota street testing pre-release cars, they were not disguised whatsoever, and had unmissable "factory" number plates

I've seen Mercedes-Benz test their car in camouflage even though the car was already unveiled. I guess they didn't wanna go through the effort to unwrap it. They were also a long way from Germany (with German plates).

I'd say the most common usage in the real world is click-bait surveillance fear articles discussing CV-Dazzle and the entire surveillance state being erected. The theater around all this is as much "it" as the things themselves.

Buddy Peter Thiel hangs out in the white house and provides Palentir services to law enforcement that they would not be allowed to do themselves without a warrant.

The surveillance state is here

I've seen plenty of these cars around Stuttgart and Munich. These patterns make it surprisingly hard to discern details in their shapes. Add to that the fact that early prototypes are deliberately padded to obscure their actual design and there's virtually no way to tell what the final production car will look like when you see these on the road.

You can see these cars (called "Erlkönig") all the time when driving near car manufacturer headquarters, and often also elsewhere on the Autobahn.

The car manufacturers do this for the coverage (pun intended). It probably also feels cool if you are on the team.

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