What if any object around you could play back sound at the touch of your finger? That is the idea behind Ishin-Denshin, an electronic art project that has just won an honourable mention at the ARS Electronica festival in Linz, Austria.
Ishin-Denshin works by getting the user to whisper a message into a microphone, which encodes the sound and then converts it into an electrical signal which modulates an electrostatic field around the human body. When the charged person touches their finger to another person's earlobe, the field causes it to vibrate slightly, reproducing the sound for the touched person to hear. The name comes from a Japanese expression meaning an unspoken understanding.
Inventor Ivan Poupyrev of Disney Research in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, likens the technology to that described in Douglas Adams's classic sci-fi series: "If you remember the beginning of The Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy, when the Vogons arrive to blow up the Earth, they turn every object on Earth into a perfect hi-fi PA system that is used to announce that the Earth is going to be destroyed. Ishin-Denshin is something along those lines, minus destruction of the Earth."
Poupyrev says he wants to scale the technology up, providing audible messages to large numbers of people solely through touch. The technology may prove especially useful to Disney. "Storytelling is one large application area where we are interested, when touching and rubbing objects (say Aladdin's lamp) is part of the game or storytelling experience," he says. "Anything new and unusual is of course very important to create magical experiences."
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