Ever been at the office, library or park enjoying the peace and quiet when, all of a sudden, an incredibly rude person decides to shatter the silence and start talking on their phone annoyingly or, continues to attempt conversation with others over and over again besides being told to ‘shh’ or ‘please, be quiet’ a thousand times?!
Do you want to shut their mouth without ever touching them or getting into an argument? Of course you do!
Well have no fear, for the Japanese Speech-Jamming gun is here!
Wired writes:
What inspired Japanese researchers Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada to create a prototype for a speech-jamming gun? J.G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick novels? Dystopian art-house cinema? The Muzak Corporation? German avant-garde electronic experiments? The LRAD sound cannon? The answer, it turns out, was the friendly local science museum.
Kurihara, a research scientist at Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, broke it down in an e-mail exchange with Wired. “One day I just came by a science museum and enjoyed a demonstration about Delayed Auditory Feedback (DAF) at [the] cognitive science corner,” says Kurihara. “When I spoke to a microphone, my voice came back to me after a few hundred millisecond delay. Then, I could not continue to speak any more. That’s fun!”
Kurihara soon realized his adventures in the science museum could be applicable to other fields. He was already interested in developing a system that “controls appropriate turn-taking at discussions.” The science museum visit was his “a-ha!” moment. “Then I came up with the gun-type SpeechJammer idea utilizing DAF,” says Kurihara. “That’s the destiny.”
Read more at wired.com