Google Chromecast
Some of the new sound-based technologies use ultrasonic frequencies -- sound that's too high-pitched for people to hear.
Google this month shipped a new
guest mode
for its Chromecast digital media player HDMI dongle. The mode lets
Android phone users control a Chromecast without connecting the normal
way, via Wi-Fi. Instead, the guest mode uses ultrasonic technology to
communicate through a TV's speakers. The ultrasonic tech "pairs" the TV
and the Android phone using a four-digit PIN code sent via sound. After
that, the control takes place over the Internet (with the TV continuing
to use your home's Wi-Fi and the phone using its own mobile broadband
connection).
The beauty of this technology is universality. Every TV has the
necessary "networking equipment" -- speakers. Every smartphone has the
right stuff, too -- a microphone. That's all you need to transmit sound
from one place to another.
Chirp
A U.K. company called
Chirp
lets you send data via sound. The basic use case is to send a picture to
someone nearby. (Both people need to have the Chirp app running.) Just
take or select a picture, then click the yellow Chirp button in the app.
The app makes a noise. If the other person accepts the picture, it
appears on his phone.
What's really happening here is not that the picture is transmitted
through the sound. The phones are simply pairing, and the picture is
being uploaded, then downloaded, through each phone's respective
Internet connections.
What's cool about it is that if 10 people have the app, all 10 can get
the picture in the same way by all hearing the same sound. It's great
for presentations, or even TV commercials, theoretically.
Clinkle
An app called
Clinkle
(for iOS and Android) lets you transfer money from one installation of
the app to another. Each person's app needs to be preconfigured with
bank or credit card details.
Clinkle has an interesting patent for something it calls
Areolink, which is an ultrasonic method for transmitting money via sound from one phone to another.
Signal360
Proximity marketing is when marketing content is transmitted wirelessly
to people in a specific location. The trouble is, it's hard to have
universal standards and get people connected to Wi-Fi or Bluetooth in,
say, a store or a mall.
That's where
Signal360 comes in. Its technology supports proximity marketing via sound.
Signal360's patented technology is designed to transmit marketing
messages via sound. Through any speaker. For example, it can broadcast
coupons over a store's PA system. It can transmit over TV commercials or
through small speakers specific to a tiny aisle in a store.
Here's another neat trick: Signal360 can transmit code during a TV
commercial or radio spot that's picked up by an app on your phone, which
notifies the advertisers that you, specifically, have heard their
commercials. With Signal360, an advertiser can then track you and
determine that after hearing its radio spot, say, 12 times and seeing
its TV commercial 30 times, you walked into a store and, after receiving
an in-store promotion, bought its product.
The company claims that it costs about $150 per store to enable its technology.
Ultrahaptics
The new generation of innovative sound-based technologies isn't all
about data transfer. One company is using ultrasonics as a new kind of
user interface.
A U.K. company called
Ultrahaptics can add the sensation of touch to virtual objects that aren't actually there. It does it with ultrasonic technology.
OK, so imagine a holographic image, or an image superimposed on what you
see through augmented reality -- or a virtual reality environment.
It's possible to use Ultrahaptics technology to enable you to touch
virtual objects and feel what you touch. Let's say you can create a
holographic ball made out of light. As your hand gets to the surface of
the ball illusion, blasts of sound create something called "acoustic
radiation pressure" in midair, and you can feel that pressure. By
computer-controlling the vibrations in the air and matching them with
the virtual illusion, the technology enables you to feel what you see.
(We'll be hearing more about Ultrahaptics during CES in Las Vegas on Jan. 6.)
But we do have to worry about hackers
As the use of sound as a networking technology grows more common, it
becomes more likely that hackers will start using sound to gain
unauthorized access to systems.
Symantec's John-Paul Power
wrote a piece this month
talking about the possibility of hack attacks on air-gapped systems.
Air-gapped systems are PCs or networks that are not connected to other
networks or to the Internet. It's generally believed that they offer the
highest level of security.
Power warns that the way to hack an air-gapped network is to somehow
infect at least one of the computers with malware. He mentions the
tried-and-true method of somehow getting a legitimate user to infect the
system, either knowingly or unknowingly. Once a system is infected,
it's possible to use sound to make that system
transmit to another computer beyond the air gap.
Of course, such a method could also be used to hack non-air-gapped
computers and networks, and such a breach might be less detectable than a
hack that goes through normal network channels.
The bad news is that sound-based hacking has enormous potential -- for
exactly the same reason that all of the sound-based technologies
mentioned in this column have potential, which is the ubiquity of
speakers and microphones.
The good news is that the development of such exploits is very rare and still in its infancy.
Sound is a fantastic medium for all kinds of powerful things, from
transferring data to further augmenting augmented reality with a sense
of touch.
We're going to be seeing a lot more sound-based technologies in the years ahead. You heard it here first!
