Tag: Acoustics

Many of the alarm clocks we’ve featured have creative or sometimes plain cruel ways of forcing people out of bed. They may be effective at waking you up, but they’re also bound to leave you pissed off, which is obviously not a great way to start the day.

MIT engineers Joe Paradiso and Yasuhiro Ono want to patent what they’re calling “Distributed Acoustic Conversation Shielding”. Yup, it’s like Get Smart’s Cone of Silence, except that it actually works. I hope. Paradiso and Ono’s acoustic shielding makes use of a network of transducers – speakers and sensors – that can distinguish the people having a conversation from those who might be eavesdropping.

A few months ago my friend’s globetrotting father bought a pair Bose noise canceling headphones. The reason: he felt compelled to buy one after sharing one too many plane rides with Bose-wearing businessmen. Too bad he didn’t wait for these headphones from Ableplanet, because right now they are dirt-cheap.