I think it would be cool to walk into a room painted entirely with this material. I bet it would be so disorienting that people would fall down and get vertigo. So weird.
It would just be....completely dark? I had this experience when working at a mine at one point, and if you went down one of the tunnels and switched off your headlamp.....it was absolute darkness. Like, we think that our bedroom at night is "completely dark" - but that's usually not true, that's always some source of light, after some adjustment you can see at least faintly. In an underground corridor without any lights at all it was very uncomfortable, it was like completely losing one sense of perception entirely.
Pilots flying in "hard" instrument conditions also experience this. You can see the interior of the airplane, but everywhere you look outside is exactly the same shade of grey/black/white, and there's no usable data from your sense about the position of the airplane relative to the earth. Passengers who think about this might intellectually get it, but it's quite a different experience when you're looking out the front window and responsible for choosing the correct control inputs. I believe scuba divers diving at night also can experience this.
I think they meant an illuminated room, but with absolutely no light being reflected by the wallls/floor/ceiling etc.
So all the visual spatial cues would be missing, despite being illuminated, like being in an infinite space. I could see how that might be disorienting and strange feeling.
Even well-lit caves (or similar environments) can be disorienting. A few years ago I was walking in a sandy-floored lava tube with a flashlight, and the floor was sufficiently uniform and featureless that I didn't have a clear sense of depth perception.
Another time I was flying a radio-controlled glider at the beach on a foggy day. There was a big rock sticking up in the middle of the beach. I thought the glider was closer than the rock, but then suddenly it vanished from sight because it was actually farther away and went behind it. Another flight I thought I was about 20 feet off the ground and then it suddenly struck the sand and slid to a stop.
I've actually worked on blocking all light in one bedroom. This is a great thing when one must sleep during the day.
The one window is thoroughly covered using well fit light blocking material. During daylight there is a very small amount of light the gets in under a door. At night it is utterly black. You may wait as long as you wish for your eyes to adjust; you cannot see your hand in front of your face. Nothing. Activating a smart phone becomes painful.
It is far easier to block light than absorb it. You can experience that type of absolute darkness with a $10 eye-mask (The new ones that look like tiny bras) from your airport. Your ears will orient you if you let them.
I was thinking about car/plane applications. At first thought, it's "that reflects no light that's a terrible idea". Thinking further, the absolute absence of anything itself stands out from a normal background, day or night. Would be a bit interesting to see.
These things have applications for stealth aircraft as they often absorb radar as well as visible light. But even for visible light, if you're looking at something painted vantablack in broad daylight, you only see a silhouette--much like WWI "Dazzle" camouflage, it's very difficult for the brain to process what you're looking at.
"if you're looking at something painted vantablack in broad daylight, you only see a silhouette"
If you scroll down the linked page, there is a photo of a vantablack BMW taken with a flashlight and a cell phone, and it simply looks like a dull gray when some light is pointed at it:
It seems like common sense to me that if you're looking at a picture on the internet that is staged just so, it is trivial to get all the "black" pixels to be exactly zero, but that doesn't tell you much about the quality of the material or how it would look to a person.
That's very interesting, I was thinking about stealth bombers. Do you think it would have applications in say, military uniforms? I wonder how it compares to digital camo, mirror based camo, etc in regards to detection.
> Do you think it would have applications in say, military uniforms?
During the first gulf war they gave us some jackets that absorbed the wavelengths the night-vision goggles could see so you'd just see a human shaped void which kind of stands out a lot more than a regular person -- not the best of plans.
I asked this exact question last time we were talking about vanta - and several people more knowledgable on stealth than me, said that they would not...
London's tate modern did a similar thing. At open ended black chamber. You blindly inched forwards to the back wall feeling as if you were about to trip over something. Then you turned around and realised with the light coming in the open end it actually wasn't that dark on the way out, its just there was nothing to pick up the light. https://www.studiointernational.com/images/articles/b/balka0...
Wouldn’t a pitch black room achieve the same effect with much less cost/effort? As far as I know the idea of these compounds is to absorb light, but if you get rid of light to begin with then you don’t need them?
You don’t experience black in absolute darkness, more of a very dark static-like fizzling grey. In order to experience the deepest black, you need to contrast it with something lighter.
There's a single bare lightbulb suspended out of reach in the void. The walls feel like ScotchBrite though you can't see them. You aren't wearing any clothes. The room begins to rotate slowly as if it were a large tumble drier, rolling you off your feet. The walls gradually turn red.
It's really not that bad. Some people find it unsettling, but many find it kind of relaxing. Derek from Veritasium has a good video on it for the interested.
