Flexpeaker is a remarkable stereo speaker made of a sheet of paper. Engineers at Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) have already produced rolls of paper stereo speakers. Next year they plan to produce a three-story high banner speaker.
For a demonstration, which you will frankly need to take on faith, see the Flexpeaker paper stereo speaker video:
(Flexpeaker paper stereo speaker video)
The goal for the researchers is to be able to mass produce standard poster-size speakers (A2, or 60cm by 44cm) costing just $20 each. Movie makers could then put out posters with soundtrack music or movie highlights emanating from them as people walk by.
The special paper is made by sandwiching thin electrodes that receive audio signals and a prepolarised diaphragm into the paper structure. A special Flexpeaker adaptor between the MP3 player and the speaker is used to play music through the paper. But in a year, ITRI hope to develop a chip that will do away with the adapter and allow people to plug a digital music player directly into the speaker.
This provides us with the sound needed to have a real poster TV like the one Larry Niven imagined in his 1976 novel A World Out of Time.
Soon enough, we will see many such sfnal devices. Philip K. Dick would need something like Flexpeaker to implement his battery-powered 3D comic book (The Zap Gun, 1965) as well as the memo-voice (War Game, 1959)
How about the talking tape from Bruce Sterling's 1998 novel Distraction?
Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!)
is devoted to the creative science inventions and ideas of sf authors. Look for
the Invention Category that interests
you, the Glossary, the Invention
Timeline, or see what's New.
Gaia - Why Stop With Just The Earth?
'But the stars are only atoms in larger space, and in that larger space the star-atoms could combine to form living matter, thinking matter, couldn't they?'
Microsoft VASA-1 Creates Personal Video From A Photo
'...to build up a video picture would require, say, ten million decisions every second. Mike, you're so fast I can't even think about it. But you aren't that fast.'