Turn Your Head Into Speakers 167
Roland Piquepaille writes "A small company based in Iowa has developed products made with a "smart" metal that can turn your walls or your head into speakers. "Last August, Etrema -- an innovative technology firm nestled in the cornfields of Ames, Iowa -- started selling those chrome discs for $1,500 a pair. Called Whispering Windows, they can turn any wall, window, or drab conference table into a speaker." The author tried the technology, and even if she needed a full bottle of Tylenol after usage, said "it's not every day that your head serves as a piece of stereo equipment." This overview tells you more about this "magic" metal, the Terfenol, which is a combination of terbium and dysprosium. The article also says that we can soon expect pirated versions of Terfenol coming from China."
Re:Been done before? (Score:3, Interesting)
Sound Cancel? (Score:5, Interesting)
This interests me more than the original article. How does a speaker-like material stop vibrations? Sure sound is a vibration... but to cancel out another sound/vibration it would have play the inverse sound at exactly the same time to cancel it out.
I'm assume the pew above just converted the sounds to either physical vibrations which the person could feel... or just adjusted the frequency to something that could be better heard/perceived.
anti-sound (Score:4, Interesting)
Similar to hippy technology (Score:4, Interesting)
It wasn't that popular. I think he said it was called something like a "Bonophone" or some combination of "bone" and "phone", but Googling for it this morning just comes up with a lot of links to naughty sites. Does anybody know if this really existed and what it was called?
Hearing for the deaf? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is the most intriguing thing about this. Would a deaf person be able to "hear" using the "head-as-speaker" technique?
Re:Walls as speakers in the military (Score:3, Interesting)
To make a speaker out of one (or more), just fix them securely to any flat surface. The bigger and flatter the surface, the better, and better yet would be to have some kind of sounding box behind it.
The pickup function works incredibly well - with one plugged into a normal guitar amp, you can shout at it as loud as you like and it barely registers, but hold it against your throat and speak normally and you get really good quality with absolutely no background noise... Excellent for phones, microphones, etc.
Re:Dickhead (Score:4, Interesting)
Granted, making this material would be a violation of US patent law (and Chinese patent law, to the extent it exists), but you're making it sound like the patent has been obfuscated, which shouldn't be.
Re:my bullshit meter is going of the scale (Score:2, Interesting)