BABBLER
Two people in an office here were having a tête-à-tête, but it was impossible for a listener standing nearby to understand what they were saying. The conversation sounded like a waterfall of voices, both tantalizingly familiar and yet incomprehensible.
The cone of silence, called Babble, is actually a device composed of a sound processor and several speakers that multiply and scramble voices that come within its range. About the size of a clock radio, the first model is designed for a person using a phone, but other models will work in open office space...
Imagine the possibilities - not just for silence, but for NOISE! The first version will cost a cool $400 tho, so maybe I should start saving and work on some more D.I.Y.-style vocal effects in the meantime...
Anyway, the article mostly looks at the research and consulting firm, Applied Minds, which developed the concept. They've got two geniuses on board, thinking outside the box, designing awesome stuff, &c, kind of interesting. MI really loved this anecdote actually:
Mr. Hillis said that Applied Minds, which is partially underwritten by Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm, and Millennium Technology Ventures of New York, is already profitable. He said it had no intention of becoming a public company. Instead, the company hopes that some of its designs will lead to spinoff companies that will be profitable for the investors.
One of the prototypes closest to becoming a candidate for a spinoff is a novel tabletop digital map, about the size of a large flat panel television. The system has a touch-sensitive screen, making it possible to handle high-resolution digital imagery as easily as sliding a paper map across a table.
The system is controlled by a series of hand gestures. For example, to zoom on a region, a user touches both hands to the screen and slides them apart.
Mr. Hillis recently demonstrated the system, which was developed for a government agency (under the contract, Mr. Hillis is not allowed to name it), to a large convention of cartographers in San Diego.
"People came up afterwards and said they were moved to tears by the demonstration," Mr. Hillis said.
As Teenage Fanclub said back in the early '90s on their somewhat-acclaimed album Thirteen - TEARS ARE COOL. That map thing sounds pretty fucking awesome also, no? You can get some pretty sweet MP3s on Teenage Fanclub's site, FYI, I kind of forget about these guys a lot but when I remember them I remember that I really really love them. So, anyway -