So near, yet so far. You might be able to see the person you want to talk to, but the din of the outside world won’t allow him to hear your voice. That and the fact that what you want to keep your message private makes yelling out of the question. Addressing this first world problem is Fuji Xerox.
After a lot of detailed R&D, they’ve created the Telephoto Megafon which is basically a targeted megaphone of sorts. The 3D-printed gadget will let the user “speak” to someone far away by simply pointing the Megafon towards that person.
The Telephoto Megafon is still in the prototype stage. Wouldn’t it be awesome if it were actually released commercially?
VIA [ Damn Geeky ]
I’d buy one if it can transmit high frequency (ultrasonic) sounds.
Beyond just pranks and fun, this could be very effective in all kinds of crowd management situations. Imagine security personnel or police giving calm and polite, personalized messages to individuals in a crowd instead of making announcements to the anonymous masses. Maybe building up of potentially dangerous compacting of a crowd could be seen beforehand and deadly ‘crowd-quakes’ avoided by such messages.
This is known as a ‘hypersonic speaker’. The sound appears to come from whatever the waves hit, which would be awesome for a Hallowe’en haunted house when, combined with a Kinect and a motorized pan/tilt mount. (Imagine hearing “Get out!” whispered right behind your head in the center of an empty room, or hearing footsteps coming towards you across the floor!)
One hilarious use was for a ‘Speech Jammer’, which combined the speaker with a highly-directional microphone. The speaker heard his own words after a variable delay of a few hundred milliseconds. Ever done a microphone test on your computer? Now imagine doing that with a ten minute speech in front of a few hundred people. :evilgrin: