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Comment by croemer | Hacker News Reader

Terrible press release. The first picture shows an _intransparent_ barrier. Is that a before after picture? And what is "meta technology"?

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This [1] is the official press release by Deutsche Bahn. I wanted to post this instead, but it is in German.

[1] https://www.deutschebahn.com/de/presse/pressestart_zentrales...

Thanks that one is better! At least it says: "m Bild: Herkömmliche Lärmschutzwand und MetaWindow im Vergleich (Visualisierung)"

They should just use the new picture and not make the previous way of doing things so central. If one just looks at the picture it could appear as if the wall changes translucency dynamically.

My guess is it's related to "metamaterials", which are materials engineered to have interesting properties by including structures smaller than the wavelength of whatever is going through them (sound, microwaves, even visible light if the structures are fine enough). There is quite a lot of research into sound-absorbing yet porous acoustic metamaterials.

(Related, but maybe not technically a metamaterial, previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38678415 )

Sounds like it, yes. I remember negative refractive index materials, now that I think about it. The press release should not invent its own term (meta technology) just to sound fancy. Just say meta material.

Seems to be a before picture. There's an "after" picture further down the page. Meta technology maybe because it's not actual train related tech, but meta tech related to trains.

This is such a pet peeve for me too, images in articles should always have captions!

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