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by tormeh 4105 days ago
It is a very good idea, but there's another problem at hand: It's not novel. I remember hearing about this many years ago, though that was using vibrations in windows to get the sound inside a building. IMO there's nothing to patent here. Unless this is the same group it's just appropriating someone else's work.

Besides, random people do think of cool stuff all the time. They just don't normally patent it or start a business based on it. I thought of real-time music streaming to phones as a subscription service way before Spotify was a thing, but there wasn't much that 15 year old me could do about it. To this day I still have no idea how I would have gone about with a similarly good idea if I got one again.
4 comments
sp332 4105 days ago
It was a plot point in the movie Eagle Eye, which came out in 2008. Maybe there's something more specific in the patent though.

And I don't know if there was a real service for this, but the idea of music streaming to phones is pretty old. Peter Shickele used it on his parody album Two Pianos are Better than One which came out in 1994. It was called "Inter-Ear TelecommuniCulturePhone - Trademark!"

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otakucode 4105 days ago
>vibrations in windows to get the sound inside a building

That is a totally unrelated problem. Recovering sound from a series of still photos compared to recovering sound from vibrations is a completely different issue altogether. Actually executing and doing it is even more different, as you run into all the implementation issues and physical bugaboos. When someone doesn't just have some vague notion, but actually implements a wholly new technique to do something previously impossible, whether it was imagined by others or not, is a patent really that absurd?

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FroshKiller 4105 days ago
The key difference is that a laser microphone is amplifying the actual vibrations caused by the sounds as they're being produced. This is using silent video and knowledge about the acoustic properties of the depicted objects & environment to simulate/recreate the sound that was not captured. You can't point a laser microphone at the past.
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jsprogrammer 4105 days ago
I remember the same thing being demonstrated on a mass-market network in the late 90s / early 00's. It was probably the Discovery channel, or similar, and likely a 'spy gadget' type show.

I'd guess someone in the military or intelligence community implemented initial prototypes not long after LASERs became available.

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