A Mask That Can Give You Superhuman Abilities

An anonymous reader writes "The students at Royal College of Art in London have developed masks that can increase your sight and hearing senses. They allow you to choose one conversation or one visual among a cluster of sounds and visuals, then hear or see the one which you want to. There are two masks developed by them: Eidos Vision and Eidos Audio. Eidos Audio allows a wearer to hear a specific conversation in a crowd and could be developed as a hearing aid and help ADHD sufferers. Eidos Vision improves vision allowing wearer to see 'time trails' similar to a timelapse photography."

Comments

I'll stick with...

[Anonymous Coward]

my Guy Fawkes mask and its superpowers.

Re:I'll stick with...

[Revek]

You mean your gonna take a web server offline for five minutes?

Unfortunate name

[arth1]

With Eidos being the name, users will expect interminably long cut scenes in-between short spurts of actually being able to use the product.

Re:Unfortunate name

[VortexCortex]

With Eidos being the name, users will expect interminably long cut scenes in-between short spurts of actually being able to use the product.

Wait, you nick-named yours Eidos?

Re:Unfortunate name

[Anonymous Coward]

You didn't even read TFS, did you...

Re: Unfortunate name

[mordjah]

+1 funny.. Lmfao

So glasses+hearing aides

[Hentes]

We already have glasses and hearing aides that don't make you look like a complete dork.

Re:So glasses+hearing aides

[Anonymous Coward]

On the other hand, it does look less dorky than google glass

Re:So glasses+hearing aides

[fiziko]

Hearing aides amplify all noises in the area. This is supposed to be selective, amplifying the selected conversation and damping out the rest. That's the new part, but to make that effective, you need to replace the current sensory input with the input from these.

Re:So glasses+hearing aides

[ninjacheeseburger]

We already have glasses and hearing aides that don't make you look like a complete dork.

If you watch the video in the article you'll see that these devices are much more sophisticated than normal glasses and hearing aids.

The sight mask appears to allow you to see the trail of motion (allowing a football manager to see where his players have moved from) and the hearing mask allow you to focus on a specific sound (allow a child with ADHD to focus on useful sounds). Although these designs do look odd they are probably not the final designs and aren't supposed to worn all the time.

 

Re:So glasses+hearing aides

[Anonymous Coward]

It also can't work well due to the ongoing gain control problems with speech amplification. Digitally managed gain control has been an amazing cluster !@#$ and a complete waste of processing power. You can't twitch the gain up and down to maximize distant speech without smearing "plosive" sounds, and you can't do it well with the limited digital sampling rates available in most low power A-D conversion systems.

Of course, there is a solution to this. Simply amplify the analog signal and clip it when it's too loud. Keep the digital systems out of it, their 1-bit minimum signals throw out low level signals that matter for low frequency sounds. This approach was documented by Robert Licklider in the early 1960's. But it's not amenable to digital processing because A-D conversion throws out all the low level signals and the zero-crossing analog data that contains the actual information. And it's got prior art, over 50 years old, so there are no patents available. So instead we get these sucky, smeared A-D based overprocessed gain systems that have already thrown out most of the important information.

Re:So glasses+hearing aides

[Grisstle]

Hearing aids can't help people with a central auditory processing disorder, the first thing I thought when I read this article was this might actually be a viable solution for CAPD. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_processing_disorder

Re:So glasses+hearing aides

[antdude]

Uh, my eye glasses and analog bone conduction hearing aid make me look like a complete dork (born as a dork too). :P

Re:So glasses+hearing aides

[Technician]

I was dissapointed in the audio specs. A mic and a DSP/Noise filter. I was hoping for a phased array of microphones that could be focusted on a single sound source to isolate a single speaker in a crowd.

Somewhat like they use in pro sports but on a smaller scale.

http://broadcastengineering.com/audio/new-microphone-audioscope-1022
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19541-audio-zoom-picks-out-lone-voice-in-the-crowd.html

Re:So glasses+hearing aides

[bluefoxlucid]

We already have Noopept.

Re:So glasses+hearing aides

[ozydingo]

The human auditory system can absolutely use timing difference to determine the location of sound. We are sensitive to interaural time differences as small as 10 microseconds. If you don't have access to that article, just search anywhere for "ITD JND" (stands for interural time difference just-noticeable-difference"

Your first paragraph appears to describe beamforming, methods of which have numerous patents.

Re:So glasses+hearing aides

[ozydingo]

Many hearing aids have directional mics. They're not always considered useful, because if you fix the directionality people miss sounds from other locations that they occasionally care about, and attempts at adaptive algorithms usually suck. Progress is being made, though. Some researchers are even trying to track the wearer's eye movements, or even use brain imaging (like EEG) to detect what location a user is trying to attend to.

Re:So glasses+hearing aides

[ozydingo]

Yeah, I don't know the patent landscape too intimately well (IANAL), but it woudln't surprise me if several annoying patents on obvious uses of beamforming were holding back some creative minds from commercializing cool things.

There are other approaches to focusing on sounds from specific directions and sounds with specific features. Looking at how the human auditory system does it is (broadly) my current line of research. With the standard multi-mic approaches, you need at least as many mics as independent sources to successfully separate them, but we as humans do a lot better than that with only two acoustic inputs.

Prior Art

[Anonymous Coward]

The one and only real mask.

Re:Prior Art

[EdZ]

I'd have gone for the more relevant MASK.

Re:Why masks?

[93 Escort Wagon]

Because that's how it would be done in comic books.

Low tech variant

[rueger]

Eidos Vision improves vision allowing wearer to see 'time trails' similar to a timelapse photography."

Oh joy. Tech that mimics the effects of magic mushrooms......

M.A.S.K. - no patents pending-prior art!

[burni2]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2Z1yLO9C-Q

Masked cruisaders .. !!!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.A.S.K._(TV_series)

Jim Carrey

[alienzed]

and here I was hoping for some Jim Carrey movie idea...

Re:Jim Carrey

[RabidReindeer]

and here I was hoping for some Jim Carrey movie idea...

S-s-s-s-s-s-MOKIN'!!

Political Use

[corychristison]

I wonder if they could adapt the technology to filter out lobbyists whispering in the politicians ears.

Re:Why masks?

[AK Marc]

Cause everyone hates the glasses, have you seen all the people on here threatening to beat up anyone they see in Google Glass?

Pathfinder

[SteveFoerster]

It's like they wanted to take all the things from Orson Scott Card's Pathfinder series and combine it, or something.

Re:Why masks?

[PPH]

Now all we have to do is to spread a rumor that the Google Glass capabilities will be built into baseball caps, enabled when worn backwards.

ITS A FRIGGIN DIRECTIONAL MIC AND HEADPHONES

[switchfeet]

what the hell is the big deal! Its a friggin directional mic and headphones, this is what we use on film sets ALL the time

Useful for autism?

[johnny5555]

I'm no expert, so correct me if I'm wrong: Isn't autism essentially a constant, overwhelming sensory overload? This seems like it could help.

Re:Useful for autism?

[Mal-2]

I was thinking the reverse -- you could program it to give a normal user an experience similar to one an autistic person experiences by default. This might help them understand, and possibly even accommodate, the sufferers.

Re:Useful for autism?

[johnny5555]

I was thinking that with the noise cancellation features, an autistic person could cancel out other stimulus to focus on a conversation with one person at a time.

Re:Why masks?

[AK Marc]

And the rear camera is built into underwear, so if the pants are so low as to show the underwear, they need the raging geeks to attack en masse.

Re:College of "arts"?

[s1d3track3D]

Those masks would make anyone look ugly. You'd expect something better from so-called artists...

Are you expecting something more in the Slipknot, Mudvayne or KISS camp?

Hmm...

[sesshomaru]

I only want such a mask if I also have the ability to summon hordes of flesh eating rats.

Can it do smell, taste and touch, too?

[CCarrot]

If it can't, then Rachel on Alphas still has it beat!

Man that's a good show, can't wait for season three! Oh, wait...

Donnie Darko

[Baby Duck]

"Time Trails" sounds like the Abyss-like CGI in Donnie Darko.

Cosplay anyone?

[Dabido]

Useful for looking like Megatron or Fearless Fly ... or combine the two and be Fearless Tron or Mega Fly.