A “Thing From the Future” shared with the class can be seen below. The arc is a decade from now, the terrain is worship, the object is a mask, and the mood is relief. I wish I knew who came up with the idea so I could credit them! It is as follows — religious leaders are frustrated by the fact that the audience gets distracted by their mobile devices. Therefore, they encourage the audience to wear glasses that prevent viewing mobile devices and only allow visuals from the speaker to be seen.

Rather than writing a design fiction, I instead decided to try to fabricate a minimum viable prototype.

The author suggested that the light coming from the podium was polarized and that visuals could be selected that way. While light from LCD screens is linearly polarized and can be blocked by placing another linear polarizer orthogonally to prevent the light coming in, it’s just as easy as rotating the screen or cocking ones head to see the screen again. The polarizers would no longer be orthogonal and light will be transmitted. Nevertheless, as the minimum needed to demonstrate the concept and as a relatively cheap option, I gathered some linear polarizers to create the prototype. I found a pair of safety glasses that looked like those in the sketch. I attached the polarizers to the outside of the glasses (unfortunately attaching them to the inside failed, since the polarized light coming through the plastic of the safety glasses diffused a bit de-polarizing the light). Finally, to stay true to the sketch I covered the rest of the frame with black paper.

Below is the result of my handiwork. I won’t expound too much and let the pictures speak for themselves. As one can see, the phone visual is not visible because the polarizer prevents the light from entering the eyes, while the speaker is visible because the directions of polarization align. The linear polarizers are both aligned such that the same effect occurs for both eyes.