ASYLUM

* Daily Dystopia

Here's something that should be outright banned: Evil Holosonic audio advertising.

What's that? "Holosonic" audio is like a spotlight, a tightly-focused 'beam' of sound. Outside of the beam, all is quiet. Inside, you pick up the audio. Apparently, it works by emitting ultrasound, too high-pitched for humans to hear — tho perhaps driving dogs insane — but as it travels through the air, tiny distortions and interference patterns cause lower-frequency, audible-to-humans sound to be given off.

Now, this is potentially cool technology: the textbook Worthy Example is of a museum, where you can listen to a recorded curator describing the exhibit you're looking at without carrying around a headset (that can break, have its batteries run out, etc). The audiobeam would only extend to a small area around each piece, so the room would be quiet and the recordings would not clash with each other.

With my interaction-design hat on, I'd love to use this tech to design, say, a haunted-house ride or other fun game-like experiences.

But using it for advertising? That shit is fucking evil. I'm sorry, but there you have it: it just is. It's putting voices in your head and that's just not acceptable. They try to spin the hell out of it in the article I linked to, claiming it's actually a good thing, claiming it "reduces noise pollution":

"If you set up a loudspeaker on the top of a building, everybody's going to hear that noise. But if you're only directing that sound to a specific viewer, you're never going to hear a neighbor complaint from street vendors or pedestrians. The whole idea is to spare other people." — Joe Pompei, president and founder of Holosonics

This is, of course, a completely bogus argument, firstly because if you set up loudspeakers like that, at least round here, you'd get your ass kicked by the local council's Noise Abatement team; secondly, because a loudspeaker is part of the environmental soundscape, it's directional, you instinctively turn your head to identify its origin, whereas the holosonic audio is secretly beamed into your goddamn skull and you don't know where from. And thirdly, it's an intrusion into your personal space, time and thoughts even more obnoxious than telemarketing, which is a sick kind of impressive, really.