We'd like to preface this story by saying "Don't try this at home," but we already know somebody—probably in Ukraine—is going to seize the opportunity anyway. Having warned you, we hereby assuage our consciences.
Companies like GoPro and Samsung have made a mark on YouTube culture by using powerful demonstrations—from smart surfboards to sledding toddlers—to punt their fare. Now, LG's jumping into the fray with something we can't quite recall seeing before.
It partnered with 2015 U.S. Extreme Rock Climbing medalist Sierra Blair-Coyle, who, in a video that defies belief, scales a skyscraper Spiderman-style, using suctions powered by two LG Code Zero K94SGN vacuum cleaners mounted on her back:
The building is about 460 feet high and situated in Songdo International Business District, a "smart city" about 40 miles southwest of Seoul, South Korea. It took Blair-Coyle about 30 minutes to get to the top, stopping just once to swap out her vacuums.
While Blair-Coyle is a pro, harnessed by safety ropes, the very logistics of the feat give us vertigo: The suctions have to bear the vacuums' weight in addition to her own, and Slashgear imagines that she probably had to turn each one off whenever she wanted to lift a pad off the glass. You really need a cool head to make this work.
LG hopes this will draw attention to the technological innovation happening in banal, everyday tools. The thinking makes sense: A demonstration like this is unexpected in a sector that suffers from an almost painful lack of imagination, and it places LG's Code Zero soundly in the ranks of the extreme demo-purveyors that populate the leisure tech space (we'd like to see Samsung test its fear-fighting VR in a situation like this!).
The best result a vacuum brand can hope for is a hard answer to the question "But will it catch the butt crumbs trapped in the couch?" By this metric, this work is a resounding success. It doesn't even matter how the Code Zero performs after your last Doritos binge. After seeing how well it holds weight while scaling glass, we'd feel stupid even asking.