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It would be nice if there was an app that a could let a bunch of people tune in to an audio stream hosted by a phone within 30 meters. Then, a professor could l
by afarrell 5y ago
It would be nice if there was an app that a could let a bunch of people tune in to an audio stream hosted by a phone within 30 meters. Then, a professor could lead walking lectures without having to turn around and shout.
This would also be useful for city tours, outdoor dance parties, and churches with hard-of-hearing parishoners.
- mathgeek 5y agoI imagine that a silent disco setup would provide this rather well. Might need one with a better form factor for walking outside, but the technology for broadcasting locally to headsets has existed for a while now. Museums likely have these deployed already.
- afarrell 5y agoThe trouble is that you need to distribute headsets to people, hope they don’t get broken, and then collect them back. If there is both an android and iPhone app, then you can let people use their own earbuds. You’d merely need to tell people “open Soapbox and pick #gymnosperms. We’ll set out on the trail on 8 or so minutes”
- wongarsu 5y agoAnd then you have to deal with people who don't have earbuds with them. Distributing headsets is a lot more reliable
- dpcx 5y agoUntil you think about people that have devices that don't use headphone ports, or don't have bluetooth on their phones (both, IIRC, are very small counts, but potentially a problem). Not to mention if you're sharing headsets that, unless they're all coming in plastic bags suggesting that they're new from the factory, everyone else's germs are all over them.
- Godel_unicode 5y ago> headsets to people, hope they don’t get broken, and then collect them back Many museums do this already for their self-guided audio tours, it's pretty old tech but it works super well.
- totetsu 5y agoI think this is planned for a future version of bluetooth.
- pomian 5y agoBrilliant idea. We have thought of that before, when in a museum, where you know there is so much more history and information than just a label. Surprised no one had done it yet.
- OneTimePetes 5y agoCould we geocode the lecture-snippets, so the statements persist at location? That way, one could advance at ones own pace. Or map it to a route of ones own design, while keeping the pace..
- asoneth 5y agoI recall projects that did something like this. Besides museums and historic neighborhoods, one memorable application was at a graveyard. Reenactors read letters and diary entries written by the deceased. The closer you were to the writer's tombstone, the louder their audio. From far away all you heard was a combination of barely audible voices. I believe the relevant terms are "audio walks" or "phonoscapes".
- Lukas_Skywalker 5y agoI have created something similar for a museum. I placed bluetooth beacons behind the exhibits, and when visitors approached them the app automatically switched to the "page" for this exhibit. The app was able to display texts, videos, images and audio files.
- Ericson2314 5y agoA lot of tour buses catering to speakers of foreign languages do exactly this.
- wil421 5y agoThe museum would lose revenue because you wouldn’t have to pay to rent their audio devices.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
- atatatat 5y ago...that's AM/FM etc radio.
- sidpatil 5y agoYeah, this is totally doable with walkie-talkies. The biggest drawbacks I can identify would be audio quality and interference.
- Godel_unicode 5y agoWithin a distance you can walk, it should be pretty easy to find a band with minimum interference even in a crowded metro. Also, quality won't be as much of an issue as range. There are pretty low limits on how much power you can use on the FM bands without a license. Source: I drove all over a crowded metro in the early 2000s with one of those fm transmitters for playing audiobooks to my shitty car stereo. 3 station presets was enough for the whole area.
- jt2190 5y agoYes. I think I’ve even seen this implemented. Certainly some drive-in theaters in North America worked like this. There would be signs telling you to tune your car radio to such-and-such frequency to hear the film audio. Here’s a picture of one: https://c2.staticflickr.com/4/3186/2718300357_ec1b9f3f45_z.jpg https://c2.staticflickr.com/4/3186/2718300357_ec1b9f3f45_z.j...
- Ancapistani 5y agoThese still exist :) https://kendadrivein.com/faqs https://kendadrivein.com/faqs
- bigdict 5y agoCould be accomplished with BLE broadcasting.
- afarrell 5y agoThis app indicates that existing Android and iPhones can already act as receivers. Can you (or anyone more familiar with the tech) verify that is true? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27294649/i-want-ble-broadcast-in-android-smart-phone https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27294649/i-want-ble-broa...
- bigdict 5y agoReceivers of BLE broadcast packets? Yes, that's how devices are discovered. It's just that you can also stuff those packets with a payload and transfer data (one way) without a connection.
- soylentgraham 5y agoI've tried using bluetooth in a museum exhibition before and noise from wifi and other equipment rendered it pretty hopeless... but may have been the modules I was using... Flawless at home/office. Useless on site
- birbs 5y agoCouldn’t you use Zoom for that?
- xur17 5y agoZoom isn't really setup for something like this. Ideally you want something that is one to many (broadcast), is low latency (since the participants would be able to hear the professor talking both in person and over the app), and is reliable.
- y4mi 5y agoSo basically a mobile hotspot with a webrtc webpage on which your headset microphone gets relayed? Participants can scan the QR-Code to join the hotspot WLAN and get directly redirected to the webrtc session
- afarrell 5y agoThat sounds even better than what I was thinking of because you wouldn’t need people to download an app. Also, ESPN and Sky could have a version of that which it could license to broadcast the audio of a football game at bars or pubs
- bilekas 5y agoThis is actually a really good idea. The hotspot could just locally serve the client and server side. Some pre connected devices could be distributed also for the elderly or the disabled. Then you could package it with a "creation studio" to create your own version for tourguides, museums, etc. Resell some hardware also as per requirements. You've got yourself a nice little business that seems useful for the business and client.
- OJFord 5y agoOh boy, if ever there was a time to invoke the Dropbox comment! Seriously though, I think it's an under-explored area. Several years ago[^] I thought it could be a fun way to do an ephemeral social networking type thing on the tube; then something a bit similar ('YikYak'?) became briefly popular (in the UK at least) but just using GPS or whatever for location, still with a central server. I think there's plenty of interesting things you could do ephemerally, P2P over Bluetooth or mobile WLAN. ([^] edit: that's not some weird claim to fame, I mean it in the sense of I've long thought this should be good, but then, I've not bothered to do anything about it, and neither it seems has anybody else, so...)
- rogerkirkness 5y agoKnowing Dropbox is like 10M lines of code now always teaches me the importance of not pretending things can in fact be built in a weekend.
- douglaswlance 5y agoYou could do a group call where everyone else is on mute.
- api 5y agoCould be done with WiFi direct on phones that support it. The fact that WiFi didn't originally ship with (and in many cases still does not support) simple P2P with nearby devices is just unbelievably stupid. Apple still insists on their own stupid standard instead of the actual standard too, at least on iOS devices. (I think Macs can be coaxed into the standard mode, but Macs are real computers.)
- webmaven 5y agoI am lookng forward to SDR-capable hardware falling in price to the point that it becomes the default for most devices. At that point, not only do wireless protocols become field-upgradeable (including more exotic options like UWB), but decentralized mesh-network protocols become installable as well.
- rahimnathwani 5y agoWhy not a 'tour guide portable FM transmitter' (less than $100) and a bunch of dollar store FM radios?
- afarrell 5y agoBecause few people already carry FM store radios in their pocket, so relying on them requires solving a logistical problem.
- athenot 5y agoTrue, but the FM solution could really be low latency, unlike the digital rube goldberg machine equivalent.
- rahimnathwani 5y agoIt will be more reliable than any solution based on either (i) a battery-powered web server, or (ii) mobile internet. And latency will be constant and near-zero. I suspect that's why a couple of the use cases you mentioned (city tours, dance parties) are usually addressed with FM radio and not apps. Perhaps there's a way to do this with a modern bluetooth stack. But none of the offline messaging apps I've seen (Bridgefy, Meshenger) support group audio.
- PeterisP 5y agoWhat's wrong with the reliability of mobile internet? I'd expect that in the target environment (e.g. some building in the middle of a city) mobile internet would be like 100% reliable, that would be a problem only in remote wilderness areas.
- rahimnathwani 5y agoThe things I had in mind: 1. I sometimes participate in Zoom/Meet calls when walking around SF. Not often enough to have a representative sample, but I know I've had a non-zero number of 1-2 second drops. 2. Students are often on a budget, and may have data caps on their mobile plans. Running out of data towards the end of the month might be OK if you're mostly in your room or the library. But it might impede you from participating in a lecture if you're walking out of wifi range.
- mro_name 5y agoKinda near-range walkie, nice. Bluetooth transmission should do, shouldn't it?
- Graffur 5y agoIs this an audio guide available at lots of museums?
- bserge 5y agoSomething like SoundSeeder (works via WiFi)
- t0mbstone 5y agoWe already have this. Just have the professor start a Zoom call on their phone and have everyone else join it using their phones while wearing headphones and their microphones muted.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y agoI think the interesting bit is tying a stream to a (moving) location, and not having to scan QR codes, type in codes, or URLs to join.
- pc86 5y agoYou just invented poorly implemented radio.
- Wowfunhappy 5y agoYou need zero-latency for this to be comfortable if participants will be in partial-hearing range a portion of the time. An analog solution (e.g. "walkie talkie") would work well, though.
- kerng 5y agoI think Crowdcast is what you are looking for.
- rurban 5y agoHorrible idea. I want it silent while walking around solving a complicated problem. It's only partially the walking, it's also the silence which brings out the best solutions to think over. But a good idea is to walk along a very loud river, the noise also clears your brain. Random talkers certainly not.
- johnchristopher 5y agoYour comment struck me as odd but then I thought maybe you live in the US or a country like that with a language largely used by everyone. In France and Belgium and Europe it's really common for museums to offer audio guides. Which are either headset with a radio receiver that plays whatever the radio emitter is cycling or a headset with a small media player that plays tracks when you enter a room or switch a button.
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y agoThat would be short range FM-Radio.