The current tech is spooky trash, parlor trick-quality from what I've used. Every time we use some of the automatic gizmos in conference rooms, we get tickets to make it stop.
Pick your favorite top video conferencing platform or camera maker and they'll want to improve what they have. The Creepy - "Just works" jump is a big one.
PS., the industry trade show is happening RIGHT NOW at https://www.infocommshow.org/
I had the "opportunity" as a patient in a very new hospital wing some 7 years ago for about 13 days. While I had a private room, the door was always open to the walkway, I guess as is normal to allow quick response by medical staff. But at one point I really felt overwhelmed by all the external noise that I could hear from the other rooms in the ward, nurse stations, and so on. I really felt that the hard surfaces and even the angular nature of the floor layout was conspiring against me - almost focussing noise into my room. I imagine given enough data you could show the poorer rest of patients prolonged their recovery period and hence increased bed occupancy and cost to the health system (important in a state run public hospital service that is predominant in Australia).
As such it would be nice to think hospitals, schools, offices would include thorough acoustic assessment to at least allow appropriate mitigation of noise during design (before having invoke more active measures like soft furnishings, etc).
Schools very often have acoustics reviews, although more often in cities than rural areas. Classrooms in addition to auditoria, gyms and common areas. Standards exist for those too.
Office buildings are hit or miss. The developer may hire us for a base building review. Tenants' architects hire us as they design their workplaces. There's a lot of push and pull to find a balance of the modern open ceiling industrial aesthetic and glass conference rooms with reasonable acoustical goals.
Working in conference rooms, people far too often are concerned about the look ( big windows, natural light, great table ) and less concerned about acoustics than would be reasonable. In my experience, Architects think people just sit around the table, and chat.
I once had a brand new office upfit project with a "flagship room" that was a large flex space, (could be a board meeting, could be a hackathon). There were three sides of glass, a concrete floor and metal ceiling structure. If you clapped in the room, it could be heard for 1.5 seconds as it bounced across all those surfaces before decaying.
My bosses were furious at the microphone quality, the installer was unhelpful and bailed on us. We hired a consultant to perform an evaluation and he told us that the room was awful, with lots of numbers ( figures for acoustic reverberation at different frequencies ) and told us of certain products that could help in those ranges.
It is a lot easier to design rooms with acoustic features than it is to retrofit them in terrible sounding rooms.
After setting up the array, once could answer questions like "where is that darn squeak coming from!", and even characterize the undesirable noise, both spatially and spectrally. You could also measure how effective noise isolation materials are, but I don't see what the spatial information gets you.
However, if weaknesses due to "perimeter gasketing, frame, door leaf, or wall construction" result in some sort of localized noise, then a system like this would certainly pinpoint it.
Acoustic cameras like from Noiseless Acoustics are on the market though they seem to be marketed to industrial customers. There are similar mapping systems using a scanning mic like from Soft dB.
It's sensitive enough to noise that I can pick up (and locate) the air vents in a room, even when the sound is at the threshold of hearing. Noise (pink and white), and even more so MLS (maximum length sequence) really "jumps out" (it's very obvious), well below my threshold of hearing.
There's so many interesting areas of research I've never had the time/money to fully investigate. I'd love to play with an "active" system, not just "passive", with a goal of experimentally finding modes of resonance of objects in a room.
I bet once can tell the relative contribution to noise of one physical object over another, but I don't know enough about construction to know if one would be able to separate the door frame from the perimeter gasketing. You do need line of sight for it to work. At the least, you'd have a way to quantify the sound leak, with numbers and reproducibility.
FWIW the Noiseless Acoustics camera costs ~$18k(!)
Could you put some sound sensors inside of some mechanical structure and use the acoustics to figure out where some physical contact is happening on the outside of the structure?
Specific Application: prosthetics devices that can - with only a few acoustic sensors - determine where the 'touch' was on the outside of the device.
If viable, it may be similarly useful for robots - or any machine in general - that needs a low-hardware (and thus low cost) method of getting course tactile information around it's boundary.
It's a big field, but if you could, for instance, set up an alert for when a noise source crosses a property border, or when something that sounds like a human comes within x meters of a particular building, I think that would be valuable. I'm no longer there, but happy to talk if you're interested.
I know very little about drones, but, in a demo I made years ago (trying to convince someone to give me money for using this in a drone defense product), I was able to "fingerprint" different drone models, even sometimes distinguish between two different drones of the same model. As long as there's line of sight, you can sometimes "see", in the data, slight changes in the speed of the propeller, as well as the rough "shape" of the drone itself.
But for all those applications, even though I love sound, I always think to myself.... "wouldn't a pair of cheap cameras do this better?" :)
> no longer there, but happy to talk if you're interested.
Thanks!
That's part of where they've gone (though the cameras are far from cheap) as well as RF, with some AI magic sprinkled on top.
I wouldn't suggest doing drone defense, but smaller-scale asset protection might be more approachable. There's what, 3000 local governments in the US? I'm sure a lot of them have had a tractor stolen from a road construction site. Or maybe if they lease their equipment you could sell a solution to the leasing company.
The problem I have trying to find the niche application is that there's not much (at least, that I could think of) where you can have high quality audio data, but where a simple camera wouldn't work. Also, full imaging (as opposed to just tracking the largest/loudest source via TDOA) is quite different math, stupendously more computationally intensive.
Monitoring structural vibrations is also useful, and I think is an ongoing research area. I mention this because it's possible to sell it and research it at the same time.
What about synchronized cameras in different locations?
In my ideal (and in the best jobs I've had in the past), someone finds me (or I find someone) who I can share a list of "cool things I've figured out how to do, but don't know the usefulness of", and that person then tells me what to build.
For your "where is that annoying sound coming from?" service, what sort of scale do you imagine, and what form factor?
A handheld consumer device with a range of ~10m which points in the direction of the loudest thing?
How much would you pay for such a device? (would love your thoughts in email)
Kids must tiptoe across in front of the camera.
If they make any noise, the camera uses a powered gimbal to aim a hose at them and squirt them with water.
And a terrifying siren goes off.
I've been considering putting multiple microphones on one side of the house to track birds. I mainly want to isolate the audio for recognition. But setting up a PTZ camera to get good shots would be even cooler.
This was one of my first at home demos! Tracking birds and cars. If you want to get started DIY and figuring it out yourself, try about 5 microphones, each 1m apart. The trick is having all the mics in line of sight to the object in question. Otherwise you're left with doing an "intersection of angles" method, which is much simpler, but horrible in terms of precision.
In a later demo I used a PTZ laser pointer to track the moving sound sources, so, it's at least possible!
The resolution is fine enough that with COTS parts, I can record my signature simply by sketching it out with my fingernail on a table.
Every few years I dust this off and play with it, wondering if there's some application or other way to "turn this into money" (an increasing concern in the coming months...<tiny>PLZ HIRE ME</>), but I'm not a "product guy".
I'll answer some questions about the technology, but would really love to know if anyone here has advice on somehow using this achievement to pay rent. :)