A Mask That Can Give You Superhuman Abilities 68
An anonymous reader writes "The students at Royal College of Art in London have developed masks that can increase your sight and hearing senses. They allow you to choose one conversation or one visual among a cluster of sounds and visuals, then hear or see the one which you want to. There are two masks developed by them: Eidos Vision and Eidos Audio. Eidos Audio allows a wearer to hear a specific conversation in a crowd and could be developed as a hearing aid and help ADHD sufferers. Eidos Vision improves vision allowing wearer to see 'time trails' similar to a timelapse photography."
I'll stick with... (Score:5, Funny)
my Guy Fawkes mask and its superpowers.
College of "arts"? (Score:1)
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Those masks would make anyone look ugly. You'd expect something better from so-called artists...
Are you expecting something more in the Slipknot, Mudvayne or KISS camp?
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You mean your gonna take a web server offline for five minutes?
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Because that's how it would be done in comic books.
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Unfortunate name (Score:5, Funny)
With Eidos being the name, users will expect interminably long cut scenes in-between short spurts of actually being able to use the product.
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With Eidos being the name, users will expect interminably long cut scenes in-between short spurts of actually being able to use the product.
Wait, you nick-named yours Eidos?
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Re: Unfortunate name (Score:1)
So glasses+hearing aides (Score:4, Insightful)
We already have glasses and hearing aides that don't make you look like a complete dork.
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On the other hand, it does look less dorky than google glass
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Hearing aides amplify all noises in the area. This is supposed to be selective, amplifying the selected conversation and damping out the rest. That's the new part, but to make that effective, you need to replace the current sensory input with the input from these.
Re:So glasses+hearing aides (Score:4, Insightful)
It also can't work well due to the ongoing gain control problems with speech amplification. Digitally managed gain control has been an amazing cluster !@#$ and a complete waste of processing power. You can't twitch the gain up and down to maximize distant speech without smearing "plosive" sounds, and you can't do it well with the limited digital sampling rates available in most low power A-D conversion systems.
Of course, there is a solution to this. Simply amplify the analog signal and clip it when it's too loud. Keep the digital systems out of it, their 1-bit minimum signals throw out low level signals that matter for low frequency sounds. This approach was documented by Robert Licklider in the early 1960's. But it's not amenable to digital processing because A-D conversion throws out all the low level signals and the zero-crossing analog data that contains the actual information. And it's got prior art, over 50 years old, so there are no patents available. So instead we get these sucky, smeared A-D based overprocessed gain systems that have already thrown out most of the important information.
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The human auditory system can absolutely use timing difference to determine the location of sound. We are sensitive to interaural time differences as small as 10 microseconds [nih.gov]. If you don't have access to that article, just search anywhere for "ITD JND" (stands for interural time difference just-noticeable-difference"
Your first paragraph appears to describe beamforming [wikipedia.org], methods of which have numerous patents.
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Yeah, I don't know the patent landscape too intimately well (IANAL), but it woudln't surprise me if several annoying patents on obvious uses of beamforming were holding back some creative minds from commercializing cool things.
There are other approaches to focusing on sounds from specific directions and sounds with specific features. Looking at how the human auditory system does it [wikipedia.org] is (broadly) my current line of research. With the standard multi-mic approaches, you need at least as many mics as independent
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Re:So glasses+hearing aides (Score:4, Insightful)
We already have glasses and hearing aides that don't make you look like a complete dork.
If you watch the video in the article you'll see that these devices are much more sophisticated than normal glasses and hearing aids.
The sight mask appears to allow you to see the trail of motion (allowing a football manager to see where his players have moved from) and the hearing mask allow you to focus on a specific sound (allow a child with ADHD to focus on useful sounds). Although these designs do look odd they are probably not the final designs and aren't supposed to worn all the time.
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Uh, my eye glasses and analog bone conduction hearing aid make me look like a complete dork (born as a dork too). :P
Re:So glasses+hearing aides (Score:4, Informative)
I was dissapointed in the audio specs. A mic and a DSP/Noise filter. I was hoping for a phased array of microphones that could be focusted on a single sound source to isolate a single speaker in a crowd.
Somewhat like they use in pro sports but on a smaller scale.
http://broadcastengineering.com/audio/new-microphone-audioscope-1022 [broadcastengineering.com]
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19541-audio-zoom-picks-out-lone-voice-in-the-crowd.html [newscientist.com]
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Prior Art (Score:1)
The one and only real mask. [youtube.com]
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Low tech variant (Score:5, Funny)
Oh joy. Tech that mimics the effects of magic mushrooms......
M.A.S.K. - no patents pending-prior art! (Score:1)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2Z1yLO9C-Q [youtube.com]
Masked cruisaders .. !!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.A.S.K._(TV_series) [wikipedia.org]
The real question is... (Score:1)
Jim Carrey (Score:4, Funny)
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and here I was hoping for some Jim Carrey movie idea...
S-s-s-s-s-s-MOKIN'!!
Political Use (Score:2, Funny)
I wonder if they could adapt the technology to filter out lobbyists whispering in the politicians ears.
Pathfinder (Score:2)
It's like they wanted to take all the things from Orson Scott Card's Pathfinder series and combine it, or something.
VIsual and Auditory effects (Score:1)
Based on the demo, this appears to be a digital way to experience taking hallucinogenic mushrooms. Timelapse trails behind movement? Sharp sound focus? Are we creating an electronic ability to simulate pharmacological effects?
ITS A FRIGGIN DIRECTIONAL MIC AND HEADPHONES (Score:1)
Useful for autism? (Score:1)
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I was thinking the reverse -- you could program it to give a normal user an experience similar to one an autistic person experiences by default. This might help them understand, and possibly even accommodate, the sufferers.
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Hmm... (Score:2)
I only want such a mask if I also have the ability to summon hordes of flesh eating rats.
Fun, fun, fun, in the sun, sun, sun (Score:1)
Will they have a model that doesn't make you look like white Kryten?
Can it do smell, taste and touch, too? (Score:2)
If it can't, then Rachel on Alphas [wikipedia.org] still has it beat!
Man that's a good show, can't wait for season three! Oh, wait... [syfy.com]
Donnie Darko (Score:2)
Cosplay anyone? (Score:1)