Noise-canceling robots to ‘mute’ loud conversations in cafe | What if we told you that we can actually silence a noisy table right next to us in a café?::undefined
I’ve always thought phase cancellation technology could potentially be crazy revolutionary. Seems these guys know what they’re doing, but the real challenges come with high decibel levels if I remember right.
If you tried to phase cancel out the sound of a jet engine, it would work and you wouldn’t hear it, but you could also have easily just burst your eardrums too, because the sound pressure level is still present, even if the actual sound is inaudible. It’s a crazy phenomena.
Edit: the sound pressure level IS cancelled out by destructive wave interference, but if this is knocked even by a matter of milliseconds, the wave is doubled and that’s not good for anyone.
Also, on retrospect, phenomena was poor word choice. It’s physics.
Besides what you mention, I have my reservations about ‘crazy revolutionary’. If I remember correctly, noise cancelling only works in one very concentrated spot where the waves are measured and cancelled out. If you move a couple of inches, the cancellation isn’t perfect anymore and does practically nothing. That’s why ANC headphones work well (always right by your ear) but any other open application seems implausible to me.
Absolutely, this is spot on, but if they can find ways to work around this like with these microphone swarms they’re proposing, then there could be a lot more applications for it. Some quite scary.
We can start with cancelling my neighbor’s dog at 6AM and work our way up to jet tarmac zen garden.
Forbidden sushi
If only the PCB was white…
NSA loves this trick
The thing is, we dont generally needed the noisy table muted, we just need it reduced in volume enough at our own table so we are able to carry out a normal conversation
Seems soooo much more complex than simply using regular noise canceling technology which we’ve had for ages now. In my previous company it was amazing how well it worked. You could be maybe 5 feet away from someone you could hear them perfectly fine, but move 10 feet away and everything was just muted down. One day we had some electrical problems and the system was down, and that’s when you really could notice how well the system worked because you could hear people all the way from the other side of the building when before when the system was running those noises were totally gone.
