Shadow protector

From Japan Today:

Because most Japanese people don’t really like the idea of having a roommate, a lot of these young people end up living alone, including young women. But while Tokyo is much safer than large cities in many other countries, crimes do happen, and criminals often consider young women who live alone to be easy targets.

To help address this problem, and also to put the minds of female tenants at ease, apartment management company Leo Palace 21 has developed what it calls the Man on the Curtain system, which is shown starting at the 1:15 mark in the video below.

Using a projector controlled by/attached to a smartphone, Man on the Curtain throws a silhouette of a man onto your curtains, so that when people outside look at your windows, there will appear to be a guy inside, thus masking that you live alone.

If you’re wondering how that’s better than just putting a cardboard cutout by your window, Man on the Curtain is full-motion, projecting videos of actual actors (in silhouette) for an extremely lifelike look. Currently, the system has 12 different options, including such intimidating routines as a boxer throwing practice punches, a marital artist going through a karate kata, a bodybuilder working out with dumbbells, and a sports fan swinging a baseball bat around.

Since it’d be easy to deduce that a short loop is a fake, each video is roughly 30 minutes long, with a variety of motions. Leo Palace 21’s introductory video doesn’t get into the specifics of how the system is operated, it seems like it’d be easy to program it to cycle from one routine to the next, which would give you about six hours of silhouettes before any footage needs to be repeated.

 Given Japan's national problem with young men failing to put much effort into finding a girlfriend, it might have been more realistic to throw in a sequence with a guy doing..well, you can guess.