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Material Turns All Surfaces into Stereo
An anonymous reader writes "According to James Bullen of NXT, 'The UK ministry of defense was experimenting with a way to dampen the sound in helicopters and developed a honeycombed material that did the opposite — conducted sound.' Cambridge-based NXT christened it "SurfaceSound" and arranged for it to be crafted into Toyota cars, Gateway computers, Hallmark greeting cards and more.
NXT is working on ways to put the technology to use in touch screens that promise to be part of a new rage in 'natural interfaces' for computers, mobile telephones, televisions and other electronic devices.
Toyota has SurfaceSound in the head liners of four of its car models.
NXT recently made a deal with greeting card giant Hallmark to use the technology in 'big cards with big sound' when opened, Bullen said."
I want them to make me a suit of that stuff!
Damn you for beating me to making the reference while I was looking up the relevant passage!
"Then there was a slight whisper, a sudden spacious whisper of open ambient sound. Every hi fi set in the world, every radio, every television, every cassette recorder, every woofer, every tweeter, every mid-range driver in the world quietly turned itself on. Every tin can, every dust bin, every window, every car, every wine glass, every sheet of rusty metal became activated as an acoustically perfect sounding board. Before the Earth passed away it was going to be treated to the very ultimate in sound reproduction, the greatest public address system ever built. But there was no concert, no music, no fanfare, just a simple message."
~Philly
If they can do it with a greeting card, I imagine they could create product packaging that plays sounds. How about a PC game box that plays the sounds from the game, for example American McGee's Alice which had interesting tracks?
Hm? just position them at the far ends of the card. Don't use the whole card as a sound source.
Would allow two sources almost a foot apart, enough for a human to pick up stereo.
Sure, taxes are great, but I'd like to see how much cash the military makes on the amazing tech their scientists come up with.
Between stuff like this (mil-spec gear modified for use in civilian life) and the medical breakthroughs they've created over the years, if the military were a standard corporation, they'd have cash coming out of every orifice not used for firing projectiles or enticing teenagers to join their ranks.
NXT has been flogging this technology for years. This is nothing new but every few years they seem to get the media to think it is.
. waterwingz
Ah, if only it were true. The underlying technology was patented by Britain defense researchers in 1991 and licensed to Verity Group, a big audio company, in 1996 (see the end of this article for a readable history here). Verity has been the company funding the money-sucking venture all this time. Even with their resources, it's taken them ten years to get this technology into the market in any big way. NXT is hardly a poster-child for quick commercial spin-off success.
Stereo != 2 channels. Stereo == anything greater than a point source [monaural]. 5.1 surround is multichannel stereo, for example.
Imagine the scene: thumper car stands at traffic light, with the sound turned up high as usual - windows are always down on those sort of cars because they have to make sure everyone hears just what a horrendous lack of taste they have.
A very large "I have loadsamoney" car silently pulls up beside it (say a Rolls or something). Guy in the back never even lowers his newspaper but says something to which his driver nods politely and pressed a button.
Front window adjacent to the thumper silently slides down, and a beautiful engineered speaker pops up - it plays one single, long violin note. All very classy.
The violin note resonates with every piece of glass in the thumper car. It all breaks, the turned down windows shatter inside the doors, the windshield spiders then crumbles, even the driver's watchface goes to pieces and his sunglasses shatter into pieces that are only saved from falling by sticking to his goatee.
Speaker pops back down while the window quietly slides shut, light goes green and the car glides forth, leaving a disassembled thumper behind..
Yum..
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