1 Corinthians 13:1
"But recently, researchers developed private “audible enclaves.”
“It is like wearing an invisible headset,” says Yun Jing, an acoustics researcher at Penn State. If you stand in the right place, you can hear a voice or music, while someone nearby hears nothing at all, Jing and colleagues reported in March in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
They achieved this marvel using acoustic metasurfaces, materials
engineered to have tiny repeating structures to manipulate sound in ways that natural materials can’t. “A metasurface is a lens that’s thinner than the wavelength of the sound waves it manipulates,” says Michael Haberman, a mechanical engineer at the University of Texas at Austin. Like lenses for light, acoustic metasurfaces can bend, shape and direct sound by changing the wave’s shape.
Jing’s team 3-D printed acoustic panels with zigzag air channels. Adjusting the path length of each channel let the team steer ultrasonic waves into curved paths. The team then covered two speakers with thin sheets of this metasurface to bend the ultrasonic beams toward each other as they propagated through the air. At the point of intersection, nonlinear interactions transformed the waves into audible sound that could be heard at only this spot.---researchers envision a future in which private conversations can happen in open spaces — no earbuds or wires required. Libraries, offices and other public places could host numerous audible enclaves to allow for private audio streams simultaneously."
"But recently, researchers developed private “audible enclaves.”
“It is like wearing an invisible headset,” says Yun Jing, an acoustics researcher at Penn State. If you stand in the right place, you can hear a voice or music, while someone nearby hears nothing at all, Jing and colleagues reported in March in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
They achieved this marvel using acoustic metasurfaces, materials
Jing’s team 3-D printed acoustic panels with zigzag air channels. Adjusting the path length of each channel let the team steer ultrasonic waves into curved paths. The team then covered two speakers with thin sheets of this metasurface to bend the ultrasonic beams toward each other as they propagated through the air. At the point of intersection, nonlinear interactions transformed the waves into audible sound that could be heard at only this spot.---researchers envision a future in which private conversations can happen in open spaces — no earbuds or wires required. Libraries, offices and other public places could host numerous audible enclaves to allow for private audio streams simultaneously."
ScienceNews
