We've been waiting for some time to introduce a true innovation in marketing communication. As everything concerning any kind of display turns from paper to digital screen, the sound has been very traditional for a long time.
On one hand, sound has always been a little underestimated fellow of a picture. This is generally true, when it comes to anything from home cinema to digital POS. The most important attributes of sound traditionally are quality and loudness. We care about what we hear, if the sound is crisp clean and loud equally.
Now, what if we want to make the sound directional? That means hearable here and quiet 1 meter further?
Dr. Joseph Pompei is the name to remember. At the age of 16, he started his career at Bose Corporation, thus dedicated his professional life to the world of sound. He invented the basic principle of beaming the sound in a similar manner to beaming the light.
The trouble with sound naturally is, that it spreads in space omni-directionally. No matter what You do, You always hear the sound from a source in any direction. There are a lot of tricks, that scientist invented and that could eventually change this behavior a little. But the main break point was the invention of principles of modulating the sound into supersonic waves, that allow us to target them very precisely, almost like a laser beam.
This scheme ilustrates the difference between regular and spotlight beaming of sound. The loudspeakers spread the sound in spheres into all directions. The Audio Spotlight technology uses narrow beam of ultrasound to deploy the sound into requested location.
The most important principle is in encoding the primary sound into ultrasound (hypersonic sound). This is done using mathematics formulas in a computer. Ultrasound is generated by piezzo-electric board. When an ultrasound beam hits the target, the sound waves break down into primary hearable sound.
To be continued in part 2. We are going to observe current application of Audio Spotlight.
