Firm brings brainpower to bear – Applied Minds has plethora of projects spanning tech fields – "The Cone of Silence" lives!!

Maxwell Smart’s "cone of silence" is finally a reality.

Two people in an office were having a tete-a-tete, but it was impossible for a listener standing nearby to understand what they were saying. The conversation sounded like a waterfall of voices, both tantalizingly familiar and yet incomprehensible.

The cone of silence, called Babble, is actually a device composed of a sound processor and several speakers that multiply and scramble voices that come within its range. About the size of a clock radio, the first model is designed for a person using a phone, but other models will work in open office space.

The voice-scrambling technology used in Babble was developed by Applied Minds, a research and consulting firm founded by Danny Hillis, a computer architect, and Bran Ferren, an industrial designer and Hollywood special-effects wizard.

Babble, which is intended to function as a substitute for walls and acoustic tiling, is an example of a new class of product that uses computing technology to shape sound. Already on the market are headphones that can cancel extraneous noises and stereo systems that can direct sound to a particular spot.

By John Markoff, New York Times

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