Iron Man fans, rejoice! Researchers claim to have developed two 3-D printed masks that can give wearer superhuman sight and hearing. One of the masks covers the wearer’s ears, mouth and nose and uses a directional microphone to give him the ability to hear an isolated sound in a noisy environment.
With the mask, developed by a group of students at the Royal College of Art in London, the user could select a person in a crowd and clearly hear his words without any surrounding noise, “Mashable” website reported. The other prototype is to be worn over one’s eyes. A camera captures video and sends it to a computer, which can apply a set of effects to it in real-time and send it back to the user. The wearer can use the mask to see movement patterns, similar to the effects of long-exposure photography. The research team behind project Eidos — Tim Bouckley, Millie Clive-Smith, Mi Eun Kim and Yuta Sugawara — believe the technology has many possible applications.
The wearer could use the visual mask it to analyse movement and technique in sports. And concert-goers could use the hearing mask to focus on a certain performer at a concert, the report said. “We are used to controlling the world around us to find the settings that suit us best. But while technology advances to aid this, our physical bodies remain the same. What if we had the same control over our senses? If we could adjust them in real time, what experiences would this make possible,” researchers said.