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Low tech sometimes succeeds where high tech fails – as one ingenious company is proving.
Chirp sends data over sound, a burst of audio that usually sounds like a bird's tweet. It doesn't transmit much data – 50 bytes – but it turns out you don't need much bandwidth to bridge the gaps between the real world and the digital world.
Chirp has already been put to use, and unusually for a small company, boasts hundreds of millions of users. Spun out of research at UCL, Chirp first stepped into the public eye four years ago with a consumer app. But it recently switched to a B2B model – licensing the technology for use in all kinds of cases via a software development kit.
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Sound has obvious disadvantages. One is that it needs to deal with noise interference, which is everywhere. And in the open, the range is short: 10 to 20 feet. But the big advantage is easy to miss: the audio bursts are a one-to-many, multidirectional transmission. So Chirps can be used as a signal – say a trigger, or a wake up call – for millions of digital devices at once. It can be played at a stadium, for example.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday November 11 2016, @08:24PM
Not the same as a cassette recorder, because in the cassette version you needed a really good connection...I ALWAYS used the line-out direct to the computer. I suppose you *could* have played the recorder into a mic, but the signal degradation would have been somewhere north of 10%, even with quite good equipment. And remember, those were analog signals, so you couldn't use commodity gear to sharpen the signal. Even with (much later) high quality VHS tape players you got a minimum of 10% degradation with every generation. The studios could get below 10%, but they couldn't reduce it to unnoticeable.
This is a signal that's intended to be recorded direct from the air, and to be digital from the word go. It's more akin to WWII sonar or radar than to the functionally more similar audio cassette to computer. It's even more similar to someone using a bullhorn in an auditorium. And much more similar to a blind man walking by echo-location (which only works if you've got good ears, have practice, and aren't in a noisy area ... knowing the area also helps a LOT, which is comparable to limitations on expected message format).
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.