Quezi

Will it pop? (photo by Matt Billings - CC-BY)

You may have seen videos such as this one, where a group of people at a party put their phones on the table around some corn kernels. They call the phones, and when the phones start ringing, the popcorn pops. Does this really happen? Wouldn’t the phone be doing the same to our brains when we use it?

There are a couple of ways you can do this trick in real life. A thin metal-topped table with an ordinary domestic iron underneath would do it, admittedly with a risk of burns and fire. Someone also tried to replicate the trick by disassembling a microwave oven to point the magnetron at the popcorn – a pretty dangerous thing to do.

The cell phone popcorn stunt was actually a piece of viral marketing dreamt up by a manufacturer of Bluetooth headsets, Cardo Systems. Pretty anti-social isn’t it, to try to sell your products by exaggerating the danger of the cellphone? Especially when a Bluetooth headset also contains a transmitter next to your brain.

Here’s a video containing a confession and explanation of the hoax. So how did they do it?

The actors are carrying on as if it’s a casual party, to catch us off guard. It’s filmed by a hand-held camera to give a “shaky style”, to get us to believe that we’re watching a genuine home-made video. There are real popcorn kernels on the table – but they don’t go anywhere. When they’re supposed to pop, some pre-popped popcorn is simply dropped onto the table. Later, the kernels are edited out after the point where they supposedly “popped”.

The original video was certainly popular, and spawned many followups. Of those, probably the best is this cautionary tale.