Your Next Notebook Display Might be a Speaker
Tired of tinny-sounding speakers in notebooks? Some systems offer nice sound but most the netbooks and smaller notebooks I’ve used lately have me plugging in a decent headset. It’s challenging to find room for speakers when you have to cram in various ports, jacks and card readers to a notebook. Harry McCracken thinks that Emo Labs might be on to something with their “invisible speakers”. From the sound of it, I think he’s right.
Obviously, Emo Labs hasn’t found a way for speakers to disappear into thin air, but they’ve done the next best thing: they created a sound-producing membrane that fits over a display. Their Edge Motion is a clear product, so it won’t affect the display quality. It also takes up less room since it sits on the display; the only additional space needed is in the display frame. That’s where miniature motors wiggle the membrane to and fro, causing for sound waves. Emo Labs is looking for the Edge Motion product to appear by year-end. Sounds great to me!
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wouldn’t a vibrating display (producing sound waves) produce a visible wobble/shake in the screen image?
If other flat panel technologies are anything to go by, the vibrations will be nigh impossible to make out. More significantly, I don’t think this will play well with resistive touchscreens, and if you use it with a capacitive pad, you’ll muss up the sound.
This sounds like a neat idea for generally frameless screens, like the Mini-Note or Macbook, but it’d depend largely on sound quality and how robust it is.