"Ishin-Den-Shin" turns your friend's fingers into headphones. We aren't joking!

Thinking of buying a new pair of headphones? Bose, Sennheiser or Beats by DRE aren't cool anymore. What's cool is using your friend's fingers as headphones and the new technology developed by Disney Research makes it possible. The prototype developed by Disney engineers is called Ishin-Den-Shin, which is a Japanese phrase for 'what the mind thinks, the heart transmits'. It comes from the Japanese concept related to interpersonal conversation without verbal communication. The technology has been developed by Olivier Bau, Ivan Poupyrev and Yuri Suzuki. All you need is this prototype machine and a friend willing to touch your ear with his/her index finger.



The project explores human body as a medium for transmission of analog sound signals. The prototype developed by the researchers turns audio message / clip into a signal that's inaudible to humans. This signal is relayed by the human body to the receiver's ear. The whole thing works as described below -

The communicator holds a microphone. The communicator speaks into the microphone and microphone transmits the signal to the attached computer. The computer records the clip and then converts it into a low-current but high voltage signal ( (<300 Vpp, <50 uA) and feeds it back to the microphone. This looped signal creates a modulated electrostatic field and produces a very small vibration in the micrphone. This vibration is relayed by the communicator's body to the receiver's ear. The ear receives the signal and starts acting as a speaker reproducing the audio clip or message.


The ishin-Den-Shin technology can turn any regular object into a speaker. Technology itself isn't' very new. Japanese NTT DoCoMo had developed a 'finger phone' about a decade ago that uses the 'bone conduction' technology. It allowed you to listen to the phone calls just by touching your index finger to the eardrum.

It'd be interesting to see what'd be the special uses of this technology. We'd like to ask all the CEans what uses cases do they see for this technology? We're sure you can think of very interesting applications! Go ahead!

Via: #-Link-Snipped-#