Imagine sending secret messages to someone just by touching them - a 'magical' device allows you to do just that using a simple microphone!
The Ishin-Den-Shin technology uses a standard microphone to record audio and then converts it into an inaudible signal transmitted through the body of the person holding the microphone.
The Ishin-Den-Shin interactive installation addresses physicality and intimacy in digital audio communication, its manufacturers, Disney, said on its website.
The installation has been designed and developed at Disney Research Pittsburgh by Yuri Suzuki, Olivier Bau and Ivan Poupyrev.
It consists of a microphone that can record sounds and transmit them through touch. Once recorded, the sound is transformed in an inaudible signal.
This signal is transmitted to a person's body when holding the microphone. The signal can be transmitted by physical contact, from body to body.
"The recorded sound becomes audible only when touching someone's ear. The sound can be heard only by the specific ear which is touched, as if the finger would be whispering the recorded sounds," the website said.
Secrets, messages and whispers can then be transmitted from person to person in physical contact with each other. Bodies become a broadcasting medium for intimate, physical, sound communication.
Shin-Denshin is a mantra which represents the traditional Japanese concept of interpersonal communication through unspoken mutual understanding.
It literally translates as "what the mind thinks, the heart transmits," the website said.
