11 ms·
New Technology Uses Lasers to Transmit Audible Messages to Specific People
- taneq 8y ago...or eyeball. :S Oh, sure, it says it's safe...
- sparkpeasy 8y agoCan't wait till rogue arrays of lasers start beaming advertisements directly into your ear while walking down the street.
- baroffoos 8y agoWhy not just play it over a speaker like is often done?
- raihansaputra 8y agoWell, now you can directly target people so personalized ads when you're walking down the street. I'm scared it would devolve to pseudo-hallucinations ('did you hear that?').
- cronix 8y agoOr subliminal messages/mind control. I imagine psychiatrist visits would be up due to this annoying voice in peoples heads. lol.
- vinni2 8y agoCoz then you can personalize and target?
- peteretep 8y agoBecause then it's obvious where it came from. Much better to spam people anonymously from a distance. People annoying other people with laser pointers is going to become _so_ much more annoying.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago> People annoying other people with laser pointers is going to become _so_ much more annoying. True. Antisocial behaviour gets orders of magnitude worse and more prevalent once you can actually make money with it.
- themodelplumber 8y agoHopefully the ad tech uses the lower-acoustic-clarity method mentioned. It'll be like bus driver announcement white noise. "Wah, wah. And if you wah wah wah, visit wah wah wah dot com today." Edit: I also wonder how it works if you modulate or otherwise moderate the interface between ear surfaces and ear-surroundings moisture, since that's apparently the resource this method needs in order to work at all. Shopping with headphones on can be a pretty nice experience IMO, and maybe it doubles as a countermeasure.
- peterarmstrong 8y agoYep, this is going to be Altered Carbon or Ghost In The Shell type of crap. Whatever you Google for will follow you everywhere, and nag you until you buy it...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- naniwaduni 8y agoPrecedent suggests that it'll nag you after you buy it... maybe both.
- ben_w 8y ago“We noticed you bought a gravestone for your mother. Your mother‘s birthday is coming up soon, would you like to buy her a box of chocolates?”
- dwighttk 8y agoAlso here’s 15 other gravestones to complete your collection.
- balabaster 8y agoPeople who looked at these gravestones also bought these zombie movies.
- ben_w 8y ago“… and that led me to werewolves, which is how Amazon turned me into a furry”
- balabaster 8y agoOther furries also liked these dog bowls
- tzs 8y agoThat's actually been done, although no lasers were involved. You can modulate an ultrasonic beam with an audible sound in such a way that someone hit by the beam will hear the audible sound. Ultrasonic beams can be focused into a fairly narrow region. See [1]. They used this in an ad in New York in 2007 for the TV series "Paranormal State", which was premiering soon on A&E. It was a paranormal themed reality show. They had a big billboard for the series on the side of a building, and Holosonic's "audio spotlight" technology on the roof that sent two beams of modulated ultrasound down to the sidewalk. Pedestrians who walked directly into the beams would hear a disembodied voice whispering creepy things like "Who's there? It's not your imagination", but someone next to them who didn't enter the beam would hear nothing. Here's a video [2]. Here's an article about that ad campaign, and it also mentions some other ad uses of the technology [3]. Interesting quote from it: > Joe Pompei, president and founder of Holosonics, said the creepy approach is key to drawing attention to A&E's show. But, he noted, the technology was designed to avoid adding to noise pollution. "If you really want to annoy a lot of people, a loudspeaker is the best way to do it," he said. "If you set up a loudspeaker on the top of a building, everybody's going to hear that noise. But if you're only directing that sound to a specific viewer, you're never going to hear a neighbor complaint from street vendors or pedestrians. The whole idea is to spare other people." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_from_ultrasound https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_from_ultrasound [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwAeb3RBZ1Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwAeb3RBZ1Y [3] https://adage.com/article/news/hear-voices-ad/122491/ https://adage.com/article/news/hear-voices-ad/122491/
- balabaster 8y agoThis is beyond creepy. Words fail me.
- eridius 8y ago> The ability to send highly targeted audio signals over the air could be used to communicate across noisy rooms or warn individuals of a dangerous situation such as an active shooter. This strikes me as a rather bizarre example to use. What's special about active shooters that would warrant using lasers to beam whispered audio messages directly into someone's ear?
- themodelplumber 8y agoMaybe it represents the ability to say "Hey you, stay put, or go that other way; the shooter is right around the corner" from, say, an overwatch point or a drone or something? In that case you wouldn't want the shooter to know. Beats waving your arms like crazy. Just spitballin' here.
- redsummer 8y agoImagine the examples people would use in less dystopian times.
- mb_72 8y agoA sad sign of the times, and it looks like the researchers were in the USA. Perhaps the media people thought this angle with garner their invention more attention.
- stereographic 8y agoIt's just one specific use case for this technology that came to mind for the researcher? Mass shootings are a pretty big deal, even if the odds of it happening to anyone is fairly low. Risk mitigation and death prevention seems like a pretty healthy choice for applying this technology, as opposed to saying something like "This could let someone beam targeted ads that only the target can hear!" "We made this thing, I wonder what we could potentially do with it that would benefit people as much as possible?"
- jerf 8y agoWhen getting money from the grant system, the grant providers are not neutral parties objectively deciding what the best science to do is, since there is no such thing as an objective, neutral party. The grant authors learn to tell the grant writers what they want to hear. This is part of why we get such a stream of stories about amazing new breakthroughs in solar, battery capacity, terrorism reduction, etc. that never seem to come to fruition. A lot of times they were never for that purpose anyhow, really; it was just a paragraph tacked on to get the grant.
- samstave 8y agoSo, do noise reducing earplugs thwart these things? and screw the mindset that active shooter is the "cool use case" for something like this. Jesus christ - if these people had imagination, how about the fact that it can be uncomfortable to always have a device sitting in your ear canal - maybe it would make a good headset for a phone conversation sitting at a desk - you dont need a thing on your head/in your ear to be able to converse on a call..
- akfish 8y agoThe principle seems simple. It's too bad that 1.9 μm laser is neither easy nor cheap to obtain. Otherwise it could be doable for DIYers. I imagine you can certainly drive people crazy with this thing. For some one who doesn't know this kind of technology's existence, it's pure magic.
- pmx 8y agoThere is an alternative method to achieve similar results using very high frequency (40khz in the case of the video below) audio as a carrier for audio that is within the human range. It modulates the amplitude of the carrier signal (in the same way that AM radio does). The high frequency audio interacts with surfaces it hits and kind 'self decodes' into human-perceivable audio. It's doable by DIYers with a little electronics knowledge, too! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBdVfUnS-pM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBdVfUnS-pM
- rizzin 8y agoIt would be cool if it were possible to make multicast-like transmissions using this tech. I can imagine a rock show where the whole band goes straight into the mixer, and instead of speakers PA uses this laser tech to transmit the sound to listeners. If you are a person who for some reason doesn't receive the transmission, it must feel very bizarre: the only acoustic sounds would be band playing the instruments silently, vocalist singing without any amplification, crowd noises. It would be a paradise for people making / receiving orders at the bar with the live music going on. Or imagine a night club where people on the dance floor receive music very loudly, but people outside of it receive it at a conversational level.
- door5 8y agoThis exists with current technology, they're called "silent parties"
- newman8r 8y agoI remember reading about the US military testing a similar technology last year http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2018/03/26/military-weapon-laser-voice/ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2018/03/26/militar...
- plasma 8y agoI remember watching a Ted talk about directional audio "Woody Norris: Hypersonic sound and other inventions" which focus's audio like a laser. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HF9G9M0cR0E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HF9G9M0cR0E - very interesting to watch.
- danielecook 8y agoI don’t understand it entirely. What do they mean when they say they are sweeping the laser at the speed of sound?
- gmueckl 8y agoThis is unintuitive: the laser makes air heat up and expand. This is how the acoustic waves are created. But this alome is not enough for audible sound. Higher amplitude is required. They get it by "piling up" a wavefront (in colloquial terms) by moving the laser exactly as fast as the wave is moving away. This heats up more air and the additional expansion adds to the already traveling wavefront.
- phren0logy 8y ago[whispered] “advertising” [/whispered]
- darrinm 8y agoThis would be a nice alternative to headphones/PC speakers for many use cases. What angle to the ear does it need to be? I.e. can the laser be directly in front of the listener?
- dzink 8y agoIf you want a sound in your year, you get a device for that. If you are a business wanting to notify people who trust you, you can give them devices or blast a speaker. This fills the use case of an actor distributing information to people who do not have enough contact or trust with that actor or who do not want the information (because they would willingly use their own device if they did). Most likely use cases: punitive or targeted spam, punishment (security alarm, military grade crowd repellent, thief targeting, etc). Also possible: misinformation, generating confusion and chaos, making people feel schizophrenic. Weapon in the making. Good uses are also possible - targeted communication to people who can’t hold devices (surgeon during surgery, vr headsets, helmet headphones, etc, but that’s too cheap a use case for such an expensive laser, so weaponization is more likely.
- rkagerer 8y agoThose depressing sentiments reflect an unfortunate reality of our time. The world wasn't always bloated with spammy advertising, and I'm hopeful that fad will eventually give way to more human-friendly business models. Yes, any new technology comes with potential for abuse. But I'm still excited that maybe one day this tech could be miniaturized enough (or deployed responsibly) to give me wireless virtual earbuds without having to stick anything in my ear.
- koonsolo 8y agoA consumer always pays, whether by paying or looking at advertisements. But the modern world offers nice alternatives now. I can watch movies and episodes without ads (thanks to Netflix), and can listen to all the songs in the world without ads (thanks to Spotify). Because I pay instead of watching ads. A lot of platforms and products offer the choice between looking at ads or letting you pay. But of course, everyone wants to have stuff for free without ads, but that's just not how a functional economy works.
- SCHiM 8y agoAt one point the TV was without ads too! My point: a netflix with ads will be more profitable than one without. However they cannot get away with that right now, competition, etc. Maybe never, but there's a reason ads came around, even for people who paid for television.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoReminds me of the way AR was implemented in the book Change Agent[0] - there were devices there using lasers to beam additional visuals directly into your eye. And, AFAIR, you had to wear laser-blocking glasses when in the city, because advertisers would abuse this tech to beam ads straight to your eyes. Anyway, if we could build that, and connect it with (improved version of) the tech from this article, we could have AR that doesn't require you to actually wear anything. -- [0] - A good biotech sci-fi; I liked it and can recommend it. Speaking of which, if there are other "biopunk" books out there, I'd love to know.
- amenghra 8y agoThere are stories of people having their orthodontic braces act as a radio antenna. Only the person with the braces would hear something. This writeup is short: https://www.recordonline.com/article/20091118/Health/911180324 https://www.recordonline.com/article/20091118/Health/9111803.... There's also a (busted) Mythbusters around picking up radio signals thru fillings.
- diegoperini 8y agoIt would be so cool if that's the way how radio technology was discovered.
- gmueckl 8y agoNo, that was absolutely not what happened. The discovery of radio waves happened in two parts: first, Maxwell completed the fundamental equations for electrodynamics by postulating that a temporally changing electrical field must be creating a magnetic field around it. Otherwise the behaviour of plate capacitors would be inconsistent. This brought the equations into a form that rather obviously allowed the derivation of a wave equation. Then it took about 20 years IIRC until Hertz managed to prove in his lab that these waves exist and can be both created and detected.
- diegoperini 8y agoSorry if my bad grammar gave you the impression I thought that is how it was discovered.
- vezycash 8y agoA sound only I can hear? This could be used to drive someone crazy, commit suicide or some other horrible task - phishing God.
- entity345 8y agoGo on, I'm listening. -- The Pentagon
- peter_d_sherman 8y agoSeems like this would have positive applications in VR/AR/Movie Theaters/Holodecks...
- jlj 8y agoLasers can also record sounds through window vibrations. Now they can be targeted transmitters too. They could continuously record and transmit sound and tailor the messages to real time conversations. Seems like high potential for abuse. For example, sharks with giant fricking laser beams that convert shark thoughts to audible sound that gets louder based on target's voice level. Or government, millitary, and adtech abuse. I'm not a big regulations person but see value in them in this case.
- ecolonsmak 8y agoOr aim the laser at another drivers rear window and tell that idiot to slow down!
- zaarn 8y agoThere is a video on youtube that explains how to do it with ultrasonic speakers; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBdVfUnS-pM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBdVfUnS-pM
- teekert 8y agoReminds met of the book series Daemon by Daniel Suarez [0], only there they use nonlinear acoustics to get this effect (if I remember correctly). Nice books, nice ideas by the way. Edit: They call it Hypersonic Sound System, not nonlinear acoustics, see [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(novel_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(novel_series) [1] http://daniel-suarez.com/daemontech.html http://daniel-suarez.com/daemontech.html
- coderintherye 8y agoReally great, underrated series. The book was also very prescient in predicting rise of a distributed digital currency, especially given that it was published before Satoshi's Bitcoin paper was published.
- teekert 8y agoI agree! I have been looking for the same epicness in his later books but it never hit that level again imho.
- pavel_lishin 8y agoI don't think it's quite analogous - everyone could hear the sound, the technology in Daemon just allowed it to appear to emanate from a specific, arbitrary location. But very reminiscent, and a great series.
- dwyerm 8y agoThe hypersonic sound system was kind of productized years ago as the "Sound Lazer" among other things. The effect is really quite stunning! It is a truly strange effect. But, as the manufacturer themselves state, it involves pointing an array of 120dB ultrasonic emitters running at full blast, even when it is transmitting silence. It's an oppressive feeling to be in a 'loud' room, yet not be able to hear anything.
- dmckeon 8y agoWas this used on US diplomats in Havana?
- cyxxon 8y agoNo, that was probably just crickets: https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/acs1zv/the_sounds_that_haunted_us_diplomats_in_cuba/ https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/acs1zv/the_sound... Thread includes sound samples.
- anon10938750136 8y agoThat's an hypotesis just as many others. Investigators and medics who visited the patients say they don't know. Source : yesterday's arstechnica's article: https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/01/canada-halves-diplomatic-staff-in-cuba-after-another-mysterious-brain-injury/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/01/canada-halves-diplom...
- dwighttk 8y agoThe sound heard around some of the possible attacks may have been crickets, but that doesn’t explain the symptoms.
- oth001 8y agoCould that not have been a sound effect (audio file) transmitted via a technology such as this?
- webdwarf 8y agoImagine the scary future of retargeting. - Doctor, I hear voices in my head - Don't worry, it's just ads
- doorbellguy 8y agoSince this stuff is based on lasers, don't we have to be in LOS for it to work?
- gmueckl 8y agoYes, but the laser is IR. So what is and is not transparent is different from visible light.
- mrhappyunhappy 8y agoReminds me of that black mirror episode where you had to pay to mute commercials.
- rolleiflex 8y agoThat’s not Black Mirror, that’s Tuesday. Meet Google Contributor: https://www.zdnet.com/article/sick-of-ads-now-you-can-pay-google-not-to-see-them-plus-sites-can-charge-ad-blocker-users/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/sick-of-ads-now-you-can-pay-go...
- ChucklesNorris 8y agoAnd apps. I hate flashing ads, I always pay the extra to be left alone. But I wonder, how many have fake, extra annoying ads? It's almost like extortion. But as technology progresses, I can see a future where AI and facial recognition and this targeted sound will torment every person, everywhere they go. The more recent Time Machine movie showed a bit of this.
- aasasd 8y agoHenry Kuttner and his wife C.L. Moore described hyper-aggressive physical ads and ad-blockers in the short story “Year Day,” published in '53. Notably, the anthology that first included the story is named “Ahead of Time.”
- ziont 8y agoi think this might be used to treat people with schizophrenia or other mental illness issues. Imagine any negative or false perception can be corrected with a medical device. "No, Janet. The butt naked dwarf with a pitchfork isn't real. Keep coding."
- grizzles 8y agoU.S. intelligence had this tech 20 years ago. I'm pretty sure I read about it on cryptome in the early 2000s.
- robbas 8y agoThanks osa.org for not spamming me with ads and cookie-popup.
- gmueckl 8y agoTwo big caveats with this tech (from the paper): - it's really silent. They claim that the signal is audible, but under pretty much ideal conditions. - creating arbitrary sound with this approach is hard. Each laser sweep generates a sharp wavefront that is audible, but that only eorks ehen the sweep is at the speed of sound. This limits the frequency at which you can emit those pulses and their shape is fixed, too. The only really changeable property is amplitude. Not sure if this can be turned into a reasonably high quality source.
- ricardobeat 8y agoIt states 60db - that’s normal conversation volume. Does the paper say otherwise?
- gmueckl 8y agoI could not find a reference to 60dB in the paper. It states 30dB SPL in the relevant plot, which is very quiet.
- stereographic 8y ago"In the lab, the researchers showed that commercially available equipment could transmit sound to a person more than 2.5 meters away at 60 decibels using the laser sweeping technique" Granted, the laser sweeping technique trades off fidelity for the volume, this is still just laboratory tests and is not a "final product" in any sense.
- gmueckl 8y agoThis claim still isn't in the paper, though. Not sure why the press release makes this much bolder claim. Seems a but weird to me. If I had the measurements to prove that, I'd include them in the paper.
- pontifier 8y agoThey mention 2 methods in the article, the sweep method, and plain old modulation. If the 2 methods could be combined it might work better. The sweep could be sped up by several orders of magnitude, and the modulation could be coordinated with it to create traveling pulse trains toward the listener that would have higher fidelity.
- innocentoldguy 8y agoThis would be great for telling that idiot driving five under in the left lane to move over, except for cases where I am that idiot. Then it would feel less great.
- amsdmasdmasdasd 8y agoI love all the innovation that's created to warn us about active shooters, all to let the active shooters keep their guns.
- ams6110 8y agoThat scenario seems contrived if you ask me. How likely is it that one of these expensive laser devices will just happen to be available at the scene of an active shooter incident? And if so, what advantage would it have compared to general PA announcements?
- balabaster 8y agoThese are not the robots you're looking for. You can go about your business.
- acct1771 8y agoTake them, they'll build more. It's metal, for fuck's sake. Not rocket science.
- Kozoxy 8y agoThis tech isn't new; there was an article 10+ years ago about an inventor who had a working prototype of this, and he was pitching the idea to the military, and the article detailed how he even went around messing with pedestrians by sending them audio only they could hear. (That article has since been brought down, by the way.)
- fukshime 8y agoOld school .. whole lot of people say they heard voices in war, and military mission over 20 years ago
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- onemoresoop 8y agoThis could not drive anyone insane as it could be easily blocked by covering the ears or wearing earplugs and it's a good thing.. I could easily see this being adopted by cheaters in passing exams:)
- m3kw9 8y agoI wonder how the sound fidelity is like, how is the bass response on it?
- synaesthesisx 8y agoLooks like active noise-cancelling headphones are the new Adblock
- segfaultbuserr 8y agoThere are lots of conspiracy theorists all over the world who suffers from schizophrenia and other mental disorders, many constantly claim to be the victims of a secret human experiment project by the governments in the past 30 years. They believe the governments have developed a psychological weapon which can directly control one's brain and the neural system though electromagnetic waves, including the ability of sending a "directed voice" straight to someone's head, and they are subjected to such torture everyday, Apparently, now their science fiction is finally partially realized... Of course, the possibility of having a practical weapon is low, while the chance of these conspiracy theorists being the actual victims of a human experiment is practically zero. But I personally do believe the R&D of such psychological weapons do exist, and this is how the non-fictional part of the conspiracy fiction originated. Related published researches is what they used as a foundation to justify it, now they just get more materials... And well, this "mental control" meme has been around since a long time ago, since the age of radio.
- LifeLiverTransp 8y agoWish we could print plasma coils into the air and energize them. Magnetic force on demand, wherever you need it.