From the weird science files: you can use a simple piece of tape to create a clear peep hole in frosted privacy glass. Check out this video to see it in action and read on to hear how it worked in our informal test.

In the video above YouTube user TheFarmacyMan shares an interesting video demonstrating a trick he stumbled upon accidentally–if you put clear tape on a frosted privacy window the tape acts as a peep hole through the glass. He has no explanation for the effect but one of the commentors suggests that perhaps the adhesive from the tape fills in the texture of the frosted window (most privacy windows are acid etched to create the “frost”) and in doing so makes the frosted glass more like the original smooth glass it was before the frosting solution was applied.

Because we’re painfully curious, we had to see if this trick would work on the frosted windows around the office. We had two windows we could test, a window in a bathroom that had been professionally frosted (it came from the window factory acid etched) and a window that had been “frosted” by being sponged with acrylic glaze to create a simple DIY privacy glaze. Although fully braced for the trick to not work, we were shocked when it worked on both windows. It didn’t create a perfectly clear portal through which to peek but it provided enough clarity that what were just blobs outside the window became easily identifiable as trees, cars on the street, the mailman coming up the sidewalk, and other features of the landscape. Consider us extremely impressed by how effective a simple piece of packing tape was rendering the privacy glass less private.

Weird Tape Effect [YouTube via BoingBoing]