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By the Eyes of the Blind: Difference between revisions
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== Literature ==
* Thestrals in ''[[Harry Potter (novel)|Harry Potter]]'' can only be seen by those who have witnessed someone die. Harry joins this group in the fifth book after he comes to terms with being there at Cedric's murder. It comes as a bit of a shock when he arrives at Hogwarts and sees that the "horseless" carriages are actually pulled by skeletal, reptile-faced, winged horses.
** The [[Public Domain Artifact#The Hand of Glory|Hand of Glory]] introduced in ''[[Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (novel)|Chamber of Secrets]]'' is a specialised example: its ''light'' can only be seen by the person holding it.
* [[Discworld]]
** Death can be seen by animals, witches and wizards, and small children. And people about to die or who are having a near-death experience. In brief, anybody whose [[Weirdness Censor]] is off. ...And Carrot, who used him as a witness for a murder in the short story 'Theatre of Cruelty'. The book ''[[Wyrd Sisters]]'' states that Death can also be seen if people truly expect to see him (which may explain Carrot's ability to use him as a witness). In ''Wyrd Sisters'', Death walks on stage during a play at a time when the audience expects an actor playing Death to show up—and is seen by everyone in the audience. And gets stage fright.
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:Sadly there are more serious consequences to this than simply being unable to tell if someone's had asparagus. There are poisonous gases which some people can't smell and so can't detect as leaking when they enter a room, which may have debilitating or fatal results.
* Certain high-frequency sounds — between about 15kHz and about 20kHz — can be heard by children and adolescents, but generally not by anyone older than 25. Sounds in this range have been put to use both as [[Teens Are Monsters|teenager repellent]] (because by nature it's an extremely irritating high-pitched whine) and as an [[Invisible to Adults|Inaudible To Adults]] mobile phone ringtone. As time passes, a person's hearing gets damaged and therefore lose some of their range. Those who take care of their hearing (protect them from loud noises, mostly) and/or have sharp ears to begin with will usually keep their ability to perceive these sounds. Conversely, some can never hear into this range, by a simple quirk of genetics.
** Those inaudible mobile phone ringtones have one (occasionally hilarious) flaw
** Some cat repellers use similar frequencies, making them inaudible to the average Western homeowner but highly irritating to their younger neighbours.
** Bat calls (not their echolocation 'chirps' but the sounds they make to signal to other bats) fall within this range.
* Certain bitter chemicals, such as phenylthiocarbamide (PTC) can only be tasted by people with the right flavor-receptors in their taste buds. People with the greatest variety of receptors and/or a denser supply of them are known as "supertasters", and tend to dislike flavors with bitter components, such as coffee or cabbage.
* Colorblind people can be useful in aerial recon. Some types of camouflage don't work on them.
* A lot of non-military camouflage looks a uniform pale grey in near-infrared. This is mostly a result of modern dyes being tuned for the visible spectrum, but has the side-effect that, for example, a game hunter's camo suit stands out as a solid block when viewed through a cheap near-IR camera. This side-effect is sometimes viewed as a safety feature: an injured person wearing camouflage is easy to spot if the rescue party uses an infrared camera (and near-IR cameras are a ''lot'' cheaper than the far-infrared "thermal imaging" kind).
** Some popular [[Virtual Reality]] headsets use near-infrared cameras to locate themselves in space, and for "passthrough" (where the wearer sees through the cameras). Add an infrared torch, and the wearer can see where (s)he's going in what, for everyone else, is complete darkness.
{{reflist}}
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