杏吧原创

What if any object around you could play back sound at the touch of your finger? That is the idea behind Ishin-Denshin, an electronic art project that has just won an honourable mention at the festival in Linz, Austria.

Ishin-Denshin works by getting the user to whisper a message into a microphone, which encodes the sound and then converts it into an electrical signal which modulates an electrostatic field around the human body. When the charged person touches their finger to another person鈥檚 earlobe, the field causes it to vibrate slightly, reproducing the sound for the touched person to hear. The name comes from a Japanese expression meaning an unspoken understanding.

Inventor Ivan Poupyrev of , likens the technology to that described in Douglas Adams鈥檚 classic sci-fi series: 鈥淚f you remember the beginning of The Hitchhiker鈥檚 Guide to Galaxy, when the Vogons arrive to blow up the Earth, they turn every object on Earth into a perfect hi-fi PA system that is used to announce that the Earth is going to be destroyed. Ishin-Denshin is something along those lines, minus destruction of the Earth.鈥�

Poupyrev says he wants to scale the technology up, providing audible messages to large numbers of people solely through touch. The technology may prove especially useful to Disney. 鈥淪torytelling is one large application area where we are interested, when touching and rubbing objects (say Aladdin鈥檚 lamp) is part of the game or storytelling experience,鈥� he says. 鈥淎nything new and unusual is of course very important to create magical experiences.鈥�