This might be partially baked. All I
am proposing is that the IEEE
declare
a standard protocol for bluetooth
audio transmission. Anyone making
bluetooth headphones, etc would
have to follow the protocol. Thus,
every headphone would be
compatible with every transmitter,
and so on. The
user would get the
choice of two audio-reception
modes: secure and unsecure.
But why? Think about the
possibilities. If a bunch of your
friends all had bluetooth
headphones, you could all listen in
on the same audio at the same time
(yess, I know the loudspeaker does
that, but this is unobtrusive). You
could have a group of people
walking
down the street, all listening to a
song being broadcast from one
person's MP3 player.
The possibilities for co-ordinated
dance numbers alone, à la Grease,
are immense.
That's all in secure mode, in which
the headset would only accept
audio
from a single source. Imagine,
however, what it would be like to
have it in unsecure mode. A simple
DSP would selectively accept the
strongest signals, allowing you to
listen in on all the bluetooth audio
transmissions going on all the time.
Not much use now, but if it caught
on, there would be vast advertising
possibilities - with only a thirty-
foot
range, a restaurant could advertise
itself to anyone nearby without
having to buy radio airtime. If the
headsets caught on, the
possibilities
for localized mass media are
immense. Anyone at all could reach
a
vast audience, essentially for free.
You could walk down the street,
listening to all the snippets of data
being broadcast every thirty feet.
When you heard something
interesting, you'd just stop for a few
minutes and listen to it. You could
follow people around listening to
(and possibly recording - basically,
audio-pickpocketing) their music.
And entirely new social culture
could
be born out of a single IEEE
standard.
This could be easily combined with
the aluminum can protocol (this
section), so that you could
selectively accept data prefixed by
the aluminum can header, telling
you where all the cans are and how
to recover them.