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Pretty simple this. When you're walking on your own somewhere, you'll be listening to music with both headphones. But, if you happen to be walking somewhere with a friend, and you want to talk to them but still listen to your tunes, you'll only use one headphone. The unused headphone, however, is dangling
somewhere around your torso, still playing music for no reason, wasting valuable battery life. I think headphones could be equipped with small gyroscopes that can detect what angle the headphones are at. If they are at the sort of angle common to being in someone's ear, then they play music. If they are 180 degrees away from that, then they are probably just dangling somewhere, out of use. The gyrsoscope could detect this, and would stop playing music, saving battery life. I originally thought of having a button on music playing devices to choose to only play in one ear, but that meant that every time you changed which ear you were listening with, you'd have to change which ear it was playing through. The gyroscopes mean you can freely switch between the left and right headphones, but you can't listen to music upside-down
Kinetic mp3 player
Kinetic_20mp3_20player
[hippo, Apr 30 2005]
[link]
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I had an amazing vision of a headbanger wearing headphones that powered themselves from the continuous head movement. |
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Or is it that headbangers were already trained by owning such headphones? |
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Anyway, would a simple pressure switch on each 'phone solve your problem? |
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respond to wax in some way? |
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Are you sure you mean gyroscope?
Wouldn't a tilt-switch work better (and
not consume energy by spinning all the
time)? |
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If an earphone makes a noise and there
is no-one there to hear it, does it cause
a tree to fall? |
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I like the idea. An infrared or pressure or float switch would be easier and more energy efficient than a gyro... I also like the idea of using the body motion of the listener to generate the electricity needed by the player. Piezo electricity could recharge a battery. Solid state players like ipods could up the efficiency compared to disk players. Piezo electric generating shoes would really be a great development! |
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[Ling & fity] Already done - see link |
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[fity], much as I love the concept. What possible use could electric storing shoes have? |
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[hidden truths] and [hippo] It would take some doing, but if people could produce electricity just by walking, a lot of personal gadgets such as PDAs, cell phones, and music players could be recharged by the electricity from the shoes. I think your question is how to transmit the electricity from the shoes to the gadgets. Comfort and style would be major factors, as you would be wearing the transmitting system. There are many ways of doing this that are being developed. I like the idea of an ankle bracelet being attached to the shoe with a small durable wire. And the ankle bracelet could be connected to small stretchable wires sown into the fabric of pants or other clothing to transmit the electricity the rest of the way to the gadgets. Shoes are a good place to generate piezo electricity because the natural energy wasted in cushioning each step would be greater than the amount of energy that could be utilized in the motion of the gadget itself, such as in hippo's watch... A watch only requires a tiny bit of electricity to work, but a music player or a PDA uses quite a bit more. Thanks for the link hippo. |
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\\ I like the idea of an ankle bracelet being attached to the shoe with a small durable wire. And the ankle bracelet could be connected to small stretchable wires\\.
<Obligatory bursting into song> And the leg bone's connected to the hip bone. </OBIS> |
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