

Micro Listening Device Pinpoints Origins of Sniper Fire / Aircraft in Battle - eirene
http://www.psfk.com/2010/03/micro-listening-device-identifies-any-sound-in-battle.html

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supahfly_remix
How can it "measure the movement of individual air particles"?

I'm guessing that it measures the phase shift of received signals between
measurements across the device and uses this to triangulate the origin of the
sound. Their website doesn't give much insight.

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sp332
From <http://dvice.com/archives/2010/03/super-listening.php>

> At its heart are two platinum strips, each 200-nanometers thick (about 600
> atoms across) by 10 micrometers wide. They're stretched parallel across a
> gap and heated to 200 degrees Celsius when operating.

> Air particles flowing past the strips cool them unevenly. The pattern of
> cooling and heating is analyzed by signal-processing software, created by
> Microflown, in a compact PC, such as the CompuLab fit-PC2.

They've got a couple cool images of the device on that page, too.

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supahfly_remix
thanks, those pictures were pretty cool.

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avner
A "battlefield" is an extremely noisy environment. I've worked on bots of such
nature for a living and while the concept they describe makes sense at a
modelling level, their process has very little field application (Dedicated
IIR-ESP when you're getting shot at?). As far as pinpointing the location of
gunfire goes, you are trained in Target Detection (TD) and have mounted
systems like Boomerang on HMMVs. Trust me, when you've been out there long
enough, you don't need a gadget to tell you what kind of gun the shot was
fired from or the sort of aircraft approaching.

Cool concept nonetheless, I hope they publish more details.

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sp332
According to the press release, it can pick out & identify sounds from inside
cars at a crowded checkpoint, or allow a soldier to act as an air traffic
controller in zero visibility. I'm not sure if it'll live up to the hype, but
it seems useful.

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avner

       allow a soldier to act as an air traffic controller in zero visibility
    

I read that on their website. Having had Marine Forward Air Controllers
embedded in my unit, the claim sounds very dubious. Again, there isn't much
technical or otherwise literature on this out there; I can only judge by my
past experience with the gadgets I used in the military and as a bot engineer
today.

