Ambient noise doesn't bother me unless it exceeds a certain volume. Musician's earplugs take care of that nicely, they're nearly invisible, fit in my pocket, the nonexistent batteries never go dead, they're cheap, no worries about breaking them, there's no weight on my head, I keep several sets handy, etc.
When i look at the bose QuietComfort earphones - earphones that are supposed to have(according to reviews) the unique ability to greatly block non-constant noise(for example talking) - and ability that to my knowledge nobody else has, and on the other hand are really expensive($270) and beyond the reach of many, i wonder:
Would some sort a programmable(app based) headphones enable an affordable noise reduction earphones that do a great job ?
Because all in all , noise is huge problem and a huge potential market.
No. The time to do D/A/D conversion and signal processing would just leave you with noise above the wavelength equivalent o the time loss, plus a whole bunch of spurious transients. It would sound quieter on a first impression, but probably prove more fatiguing over time due to the departure from natural noise spectra (which our brains are better at filtering)...which is exactly why I find Bose's headphones impossible to tolerate for more than a minute or two.
If you want quiet, get a pair of large close-backed headphones with good insulation, such as Sony MDR-7506. OK, so they weigh a bit more. OTOH they cost less and sound better, which is why they're a fixture in the gear boxes of location recordists.
Keyword here is definitely "sound better." Bose's headphones do not sound very good at all, though I'm not sure if it's due to the quality of the headphone driver, side effects of the active noise cancellation, or a combination of the two.
Maybe it's your personal taaste(or that you haven't tried the right earphones) , but at least according to reviews, many are quiet pleased with a good noise cancelling tech when it's working well.
Well, you can find an audience for anything. I'm a sound engineer (mainly for film) by profession, so although I'm pretty opinionated about this my comments are based on nearly 20 years years of field recording experience.
Latency is a real problem, so I don't think doing the noise cancellation in software would ever work particularly well. You almost certainly need dedicated hardware, or at least a programmable chip with a low latency connection to the headphones and all the other necessary components connected at low latency as well (some microphone(s) picking up the ambient noise, for example.)
You're certainly not ever going to do noise cancellation over bluetooth.
I bet the headphones could be much cheaper, though. Bose almost certainly wants to monetize their R&D investment and take advantage of their significant marketshare. (There are non-Bose noise cancelling headphones, but I don't see them around often.)
the Bose noise cancelling in ear plugs already do the processing in a "dongle" which is at the end of the plug that goes into the phone. nothing is stopping Apple/Samsung/whatever to put this piece of hardware into the phone.
and remember the new Beats headphones that are supposed to hook into the Lightning port instead of the audio jack? THIS is the use case right there.
Bluetooth audio introduces obscene amounts of latency. Whatever that dongle's doing, it's not broadcasting noise-cancelled audio over bluetooth. It's probably something low-latency like RF.
The wireless speakers/headphones and mics supported by typical mobile phones are all bluetooth. As a result, you wouldn't be able to easily (if at all) do noise cancellation for those devices via software.
You could totally do it for wired headphones, though, if you sorted out the mic positioning problem and the processing latency problem! The processing latency issue is the big one, in my opinion. Doing it without dedicated circuitry on your iPhone without the interference of other (system or user-mode) software is gonna be tricky. A pause on the order of 3ms could be big enough to cause audible glitches in the noise cancellation or give you a headache.
Sure, you'll probably need dedicated low latency hardware. But that's probably relatively cheap, and shouldn't prevent apple ,or even a smaller company doing something in that area.
Cost isn't what's preventing Apple or anyone else from doing this. The patents are. They have titles like "Method and Apparatus for Minimizing Latency in Digital Signal Processing Systems".
We used the laptop's mic as the source of environmental sound and just flipped the signals and play them back on a headphone. Because of the distance between the laptop and our ears, the signals can't really be cancelled that trivially.
The app ended up amplifying non-noises (we had some filtering) and we could hear other people talking quietly even across a room. So we jokingly said we built a spying tool on demo.
An alternative limiting factor could be the lack of great, low cost ,measurement tools. But there are some signs we're getting there, like this[1] chip based platform that can test for 170,000 proteins on a single test, cheaply.
Maybe the thing behind this google move is an understanding that it's possible, in some time feasible for google's projects, to commercialize such testing platforms, and they want in at the opportunities that will result ?
One view is that , as far as eCommerce , mobile is really hard(very low conversion rate) and nobody has yet cracked the formula.This could be a very big risk to amazon if someone cracks it before them.
So they want to find the formula to do it right.and they must do it alone - because sharing data with others is risky. One good bet on the formula is a physical shopping button and the whole button thing. So they try.
But since it's only a trial and not a full fleshed phone with a business model(maybe it was at some point, but competition is hard and changed that),It makes sense to offer it in limited volume - more economical, easier to try new things over smaller groups, etc.
So the price is in order to sell to a few, but once they crack the formula, they prices will probably go down.
This same "trial" theory could also be true for mayday - because customer support is expensive ,but very valuable for a retailer.
Not wanting to discourage you, but reddit.com/r/science does something pretty similar and very successfully - they have 6 million subscribers ,many comm enters are scientists, and the comment quality is usually very high , and they have the reddit mail support which is highly conductive to getting responses from people.
