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Transparent Hearing

Transparent Hearing is an experiment with your perception of hearing using a "Pseudophone". A Pseudophone is a headset with microphones attached, and Transparent Hearing is an advanced version of it.

The headphones detect when somebody approaches you to talk to you, and pauses your MP3 player. Once you finish your conversation (without taking the headphones down), it starts off where you left. You can also change dynamically how much of your environment you hear, because the input from the microphones can be amplified. The coolest, however, is when you change the input around, i.e. you hear with your right ear what comes into your left ear and vice versa. This is really freaky, because you always turn your head in the wrong direction.

Two of these devices are connected via infrared link, and activated, for example at a party: once you look at a person, you can "swap ears", and listen to what this person hears at the other end of the room.

It has lots of other funny applications, but also a scientific background. This project received international recognition and was presented at the Human-Computer Interaction conference in the USA. The project page, including the paper and presentation, is available on the Transparent Hearing page.




 
     
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