South Korea deploys hologram police officer | Hacker News Reader

South Korea deploys hologram police officer

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26 pointsamichail26 comments

Staff helps! I had this thought today taking the train here in Japan, why I feel safe compared to other countries. Every station is staffed with a real person. Most trains have at least two people in them. One driver and a second staff announcing and checking doors. The staff is clearly visible and in uniform. I know Japans base safety level is higher than the rest of the world. But I think putting trained staff in uniform on display would improve the situation everywhere.

I don't live in Japan, but I don't remember being in a train where there wouldn't be at least two people from the staff in uniforms. Could you explain what you have in mind? Are there trains without drivers or without people checking tickets?

The skytrain in Vancouver, Canada, has nobody from staff and it's fully automated. Really cool.

But it does have transit police roving randomly throughout the system

True. I love the skytrain, so I'm not complaining. Just a different perspective

I wasn’t aware we had suddenly mastered the physics for holograms (I was envisioning something Star Wars esque) but there was no linked video so I looked it up:

https://youtu.be/Sj2Rl4SOJe8

This looks more like a… projection? Not exactly my Star Wars fantasy

The article has no mention of how the crime rate is going outside of the park...is there good sources on the subject ?

Looking around, Numbeo keeps an index every year, and for South Korea in general it went from 25.5 to 24.9 for 2023->2024, with a general downward trend since 2021.

Cute story, but looks like crime rate is going down more broadly ?

https://www.numbeo.com/crime/rankings_by_country.jsp?title=2...

From a South Korean news article (translated using llm):

> The police installed human-sized holograms in this park last October. The videos played daily from 7 PM to 10 PM. Analyzing crime occurrences for eight months until May of this year, it was found that the number of major crimes (murder, robbery, rape, theft, violence) within the park's radius decreased by about 22% compared to the same period before the installation (October 2023 to May 2024). This park was a place with frequent reports due to drinking, alcohol-related violence, and disturbances.

Numbeo is entirely based on self-reports by the kinds of people who use Numbeo. For price comparisons you can at least argue that although the prices listed are much too high, it's a realistic representation of how much you're likely to pay if you're a naive Westerner who interacts with locals mainly in English and isn't particularly price-sensitive. But the crime index is entirely based on how worried people are about crime. Considering that most people won't personally become victims of a crime in a given year even in relatively high-crime areas, the crime index tells you more about the people doing the self-reporting than about the level of crime.

There is a very famous experiment which has been reproduced many times - I don't know if this is the original: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10437101/ - where you can measurably impact how much strangers will donate to a charitable cause simply by painting a pair of eyes on the donation box. I imagine this "hologram" is largely the same effect.

Same for fridges at workplaces - stick a picture of some eyes on the fridge...theft goes down.

Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam was having staff shortage problems a few years ago, so they deployed holographic security guards that didn't threaten strikes. The only problem was that people would try to put their arms through real security guards. ;)

https://speld.nl/2022/05/31/schiphol-zet-hologrammen-in-van-...

Where I live in the UK there’s a chain of shops called Home Bargains that for some bizarre reason has a life-size cardboard cutout of a security guard at the door of every store instead of the real thing. This seems like a version of that but maybe people will pay more attention to it.

How long before we get a K-drama where some lonely single falls in love with the hologram?

netflix-greenlit.meme

Yes. Yes! Like Amelie with the photo booth guy. She has to find the officer in the hologram. But there is a twist! Maybe he's in a wheelchair now, pushing papers behind a desk. Or he's been disfigured beyond recognition in a horrible arson or acid attack. She still loves him though.

> It pops up every two minutes to deliver a pre-recorded audio message reminding passers-by that they are being watched by security cameras

Was the reduction of crime caused by the image or by the cameras?

Or was it because it attracted more people to the area, making criminals less likely to hang around?

Isn't this just a scarecrow for humans? As with real scarecrows, I'd expect the effect to vanish over time once people get used to it.

(The reminder that there are real security cameras might be more effective though)

It’s working because:

> people were too scared to enter a park with a “ghost police officer”

A scarecrow for humans.

I can imagine cameras connected to AI. AI detects crime in action (beating or something) and initiates the hologram which says cease now the police are coming . Might prevent a a crime from becoming bigger.

This has to be something like Pepper's Ghost right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper%27s_ghost

From the photo, I would bet it's a projection onto a person-shaped glass or plastic standee, maybe with some texturing and projection mapping to add a "3D" effect.

There's a video; It's literally just a projector pointed at a flat human shaped board

An owl, but for criminals.

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