Talking glass, which was featured recently in the famous Tom Cruise Movie Minority Report where advertising would spring to life and communicate with the actor; is not new science. In fact it has been around since the 1940s and some believe that the ghost of Lincoln, which was discussed in the biographies of Richard Nixon as being in the White House when looking at his picture on the wall was Whispering Windows Technology. In other words unfortunately ghosts do not exist in the white house at all. These technologies where called Terfonal Devices and were developed by scientists at the University of Iowa and were primarily used to enhance sonar capabilities. Today you can buy a small personal device for your mirror at home to tell you that you look great or use the mirror as a speaker for your favorite music. The talking glass advertisements to day use magnetostriction, that of course being a real fancy name for a hockey puck size transducer unit made of Terfonal-D alloy which is a blend of various rare alloys, which is attached to the flat surface via a small inconspicuous wire. This rapid shape changing attached transducer is then hooked up to an amplifier. This allows the glass to vibrate at up to 20,000 times per second producing sound. What is interesting is that marketers of retail stores have found ways to hook this to counter tops, tales, windows, mannequins, shelves and even walls. The company which produces this is Entrema Products in Ames, IA; http://www.etrema-usa.com . This technology lends itself well to observation decks on moon colonies, space stations and Space Suits. We should be fully looking into these new advances of older technologies. This is hardly a new science but it could be used for many other purposes as well. For instance we could hook this up to a heads up display unit and miniaturize it. It could be used for Heads Up Displays in attack helicopters, Racing, Private Jet Aircraft. It could be used to read your airspeed on landing in a corporate jet. It could be used on the space shuttle to read out altitude, speed, heat, angles on re-entry. It could be used on Docking Maneuvers of spacecraft boarding the ISS. It could be used for pilots landing on aircraft carriers. It could be incorporated into night vision systems, combat Army tanks, gun sites. We could use it for satellite controller ground stations. It would work for UAV tele-robotics. It would well in Virtual Reality Environments, Augmented Reality, or even video games where you turned your windows into elements of a 360-degree sound system. The possibilities are endless. Think about it. |
