New Technology Uses Lasers to Transmit Audible Messages to Specific People

This would be a nice alternative to headphones/PC speakers for many use cases. What angle to the ear does it need to be? I.e. can the laser be directly in front of the listener?

If you want a sound in your year, you get a device for that. If you are a business wanting to notify people who trust you, you can give them devices or blast a speaker. This fills the use case of an actor distributing information to people who do not have enough contact or trust with that actor or who do not want the information (because they would willingly use their own device if they did). Most likely use cases: punitive or targeted spam, punishment (security alarm, military grade crowd repellent, thief targeting, etc). Also possible: misinformation, generating confusion and chaos, making people feel schizophrenic. Weapon in the making. Good uses are also possible - targeted communication to people who can’t hold devices (surgeon during surgery, vr headsets, helmet headphones, etc, but that’s too cheap a use case for such an expensive laser, so weaponization is more likely.

Yep, this is going to be Altered Carbon or Ghost In The Shell type of crap. Whatever you Google for will follow you everywhere, and nag you until you buy it...

That's actually been done, although no lasers were involved. You can modulate an ultrasonic beam with an audible sound in such a way that someone hit by the beam will hear the audible sound. Ultrasonic beams can be focused into a fairly narrow region. See [1].

They used this in an ad in New York in 2007 for the TV series "Paranormal State", which was premiering soon on A&E. It was a paranormal themed reality show. They had a big billboard for the series on the side of a building, and Holosonic's "audio spotlight" technology on the roof that sent two beams of modulated ultrasound down to the sidewalk.

Pedestrians who walked directly into the beams would hear a disembodied voice whispering creepy things like "Who's there? It's not your imagination", but someone next to them who didn't enter the beam would hear nothing. Here's a video [2].

Here's an article about that ad campaign, and it also mentions some other ad uses of the technology [3]. Interesting quote from it:

> Joe Pompei, president and founder of Holosonics, said the creepy approach is key to drawing attention to A&E's show. But, he noted, the technology was designed to avoid adding to noise pollution. "If you really want to annoy a lot of people, a loudspeaker is the best way to do it," he said. "If you set up a loudspeaker on the top of a building, everybody's going to hear that noise. But if you're only directing that sound to a specific viewer, you're never going to hear a neighbor complaint from street vendors or pedestrians. The whole idea is to spare other people."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_from_ultrasound

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwAeb3RBZ1Y

[3] https://adage.com/article/news/hear-voices-ad/122491/

Seems like this would have positive applications in VR/AR/Movie Theaters/Holodecks...