Noise cancelling windows let you live in peace
Here’s one for the reclusive ones out there. These noise-canceling windows, developed in a lab in Germany, claim to have the capacity to shut out must of the world’s undesirable noise, including jets, cars, buses, and neighbors. The technology is based around the assumption that most windows act as natural amplification system, reacting to external noise by vibrating and amplifying whatever sound waves pass through them. These new windows aim to control that vibration with a combination of tiny piezoelectric patches huh?. They send out vibrations that counteract the incoming sound waves, much in the same way that noise-canceling headphones sense the frequencies of incoming white noise and send out equivalent frequencies to negate them. It could be a while before we see these in any sort of consumer application, but the prospect of finally being able to get a good night’s sleep without the dull roar of the freeway outside my bedroom has me waiting with bleary-eyed excitement.
[Via DiscoveryChannel]
