When I am King: City Spectacles

When I am King...

New glasses will be available for city folks.

Anyone who's walked around in a city knows that you really don't want to see what's around you. For example, you don't want to see the details of that viscous shiny puddle you nearly stepped in. And you don't want to meet anyone's eye unless you want to be panhandled, hit, propositioned, or asked to take some picture of a tourist smiling in front of a random building or homeless person.

We all have our coping mechanisms to work around these difficulties.

You have to look where you're stepping because you'd prefer not to step in the stuff you don't want to see. But maybe you squint your eyes a bit, to avoid taking in too much detail.

Meeting the eyes of those around us is a harder one. We're born with instincts that compel us to look others in the eye. Even a baby that's not yet old enough to start disrespecting you and asking for weekly allowance knows how to lock you into a stare. It's some weird combination of a test of wills (that damn baby wins every time) and a plea for sympathy (the baby has none; just a lot of spit-up). Besides our instinct to look at others, we also don't want to completely ignore the nuts around us in case one of them is holding a knife or a coupon for a free cup of coffee.

But we must fight our nature to lock eyes with anyone. Or if we do happen to meet anyone's eyes by mistake, we need to quickly look away, as if we were only looking in that direction because we thought that glop of goo in the corner of their eye was a shiny quarter to pick up. So we shift our glance away suddenly and look down at the sidewalk to try to avoid the next phlegm puddle or dead body.

Pretty soon, we're walking down the street squinting and jerking our eyes from thing to thing as we shamble along, hoping nobody notices us, looking exactly like the people we're trying to avoid in the first place.

When I am King, technology will once again come to the rescue. Just as its already done for pollution, global warming, world hunger, and acne, technology will save us from our city trials. My ministry will introduce the new City Spectacles that will simplify our lives dramatically. No longer will you see things you didn't want to see on the sidewalk, or meet the eyes of those in need of just a little compassion; these glasses will make both of these trials a breeze.

For the sidewalk-viewing portion, the glasses will introduce the new "Fuz-Coat" filters that will blur everything just enough so that you can see that something is there, but you can't tell exactly what it is.

Before	After

Blurring is not enough to ward off stranger danger; you're blurred eyes probably just look like they feel. To do this, we've introduced our new "Crazy-Eyez" feature, that makes each eye look as if it's looking somewhere else entirely. Not only does this convince the person you're looking at that your eyes are not looking in their direction, but because your eyes aren't aligned with each other, they won't want to approach you at all.

Before	After

Prototypes are still being tested, but look forward to having these. You really can not see the difference!