While making the world a little quieter, this would potentially also make the world a lot more expensive. Imagine if everyone had these systems in their homes. Imagine how much more energy would be consumed.. for silence! The amount of energy and resources going into producing all the speakers and electronics to create such an environment on a consumer scale (with today’s manufacturing processes at least) would be huge, I’d imagine.I suppose in reality though for this to be plausible on a consumer scale there would just need to be a way to make vibrating/oscillating walls efficiently and sustainably.I could see this technology being useful in spaces where more than one person is present to allow for uninterrupted conversation (like a meeting room), or places such as music/recording studios where silence is required.I’m also curious how the system knows when to silence ambient/external noise, vs. noise from the person/phone/music/or other analog sound producing objects in the room as to allow for conversation. With noise-cancelling headphones it’s easy because there is a direct signal with audio information that can be part of the algorithm to block other sounds. But with this, I’d imagine you’d need a clever way of determining wanted vs. unwanted noise to cancel.In this case mic’s would need to be on the surface of both sides of the wall/floor/ceiling to determine external vs. internal sounds/”noise” and you could actually create a matrix for apartments so that they utilize the same signals for neighbouring apartment surfaces to determine wanted vs. unwanted noise.But if I was in the position of the individual profiled in the
video (ie. having noisy neighbours), I’d probably opt for the more economical solution: earplugs.