This Helmet Gives You ECHOLOCATION Powers

This is a bat. Bats range from adorable to faces that look like the afterimage on an OSHA warning sign, but the reason we talk about bats is because many of them have a superpower that they share with creatures like dolphins and whales. we want for ourselves and that is the ability to scream and find out where your food is from the reflex better known as

echolocation

, since it is still technically illegal to forcibly turn people into monstrous bat creatures for our

echolocation

powers

. Instead, we turned to the dark arts of physics and built

this

manbat 9000, but before I can explain how it works and how we're going to test it, we must first understand how echolocation works in the first place, most animals that can echolocating actually doesn't just shout out what This is how echolocation is usually depicted.

Instead, each of them has developed special mechanisms to focus the sounds they emit into a relatively narrow beam. For example, dolphins fire at least one, if not two, fairly narrow ultrasound beams for their echolocation, which they can direct quite precisely. They have developed a special structure on their head specifically to amplify and transmit those sounds and point out where the beam is going as long as they can and they will make wider calls to search a large area or just listen passively most of the time if they are actively searching they are using a focus beam and those beams are no joke.

There's a reason you can hear whales from so far underwater. Sperm whale calls reach intensities as high as 230 DB, which is comfortable enough to burst your lungs or tear you apart. bones if you were right in front of the whale in the water, a fact they will use to hunt and kill or at least stun their prey before eating them. Divers who have swum with sperm whales have described their bodies aching afterward just from The Sound's emissions. Some of the creatures, the bats, also use tricks to focus their sound into rays, but they had to solve the problem differently, as they need to remain light in order to fly, so instead of a giant mass of fat, their Faces have developed structures to focus their sounds, which is also why many of them look like they have stuck their faces in a vacuum cleaner.

All those weird Flappy bits are actually the pinnacle of Sonic technology by changing the frequency of his calls and making chirping noises. At the top of the ultrasound range, they can narrow or widen the formed beam. by its 50° to 20° clicks, which is actually quite narrow when you think about sound traveling through the air, so echolocation is often a lot more like searching around with a flashlight made of sound than to the type of wide-range movement. call and response that you may have been imagining now the big question is the difficult part of echolocation generating the sound or processing the Return.

By that I mean if we could somehow give humans the ability to shoot a beam of sound out of their face like dolphins do. our brains process it and use it to navigate and find things or it is necessary to develop both the special scream and a special brain to make use of the superpower. Bats and dolphins are not only able to locate prey but also tell a lot about their environment. from how their calls change when they interact with different materials and then use all that information to navigate in total darkness, which of course brings us back to the manbat 9000 which, as you might expect, is a

helmet

that allows you to shoot a highly focused beam of sound coming out of your head,

this

contraption on the front is called a parametric speaker which, unlike almost any speaker you've ever interacted with, has some incredibly strange properties, the main one of course being that the sound It comes out in a very narrow beam.

It usually feels like a laser of sound if you're close to a speaker and you tilt it so it's a little off axis you still hear it, it's a little quieter, but with a parametric speaker if it's not pointed directly at you. You basically don't hear it, and even stranger, if you don't get hit directly by the beam, the sound seems to come from wherever the sound beam hits, so if I'm the speaker on the wall, the sound seems to be coming from of the wall, so what's happening here there's obviously some physics tricks at play.

When you look at the business side of this, you'll probably notice that it's actually a series of many small emitters, but those aren't speakers, they're ultrasound transducers. meaning they can only do ultrasound because and this is going to sound weird, this speaker doesn't fire audible sound at least not directly, there are actually three effects used simultaneously to make this weirdness work. The first is that the higher the frequency of a sound. the more directional its spread will be, this is the trick bats use and why they use ultrasound transducers. The regular frequencies that humans can hear are spread too far.

This is the same reason that ultrasound probes for medical imaging use ultrasounds that have an even higher frequency in the many hundreds or millions of Hertz ranges they want those waves to get as close as possible to a straight line and the following effect is that if you have a lot of small boundaries instead of one big one, you've created something called a phased array that we can squeeze even more into the beam that forms here's a little simulation to help explain how this works when we have a transmitter, the waves just They spread outwards spreading widely, but what happens when we add a few more and make them release waves at the same time?

What each emitter does will interact and some areas will become stronger and some areas will cancel out as we add more and more emitters, the beam becomes narrower and narrower as the signals interact, they are amplified and canceled in different areas, something really interesting what we can do with this is the point The Beam without moving parts, notice what happens when we start to introduce a slight delay in the emitters if we make a nice Delay gradient from left to right where the first emitter is the most delayed and The last sender is the least delayed.

We can see that the beam has moved from the center to one side and if we introduce the same delay but starting from the other side we can push the beam to the other side. One interesting thing is that this also works in reverse, so if you were to do this with radio and set up an array of antennas the same way, where there is a phase delay between each antenna, you can virtually pinpoint where the array can receive signals from. again no moving parts and this is how Starlink antennas work, they use a phased array to maintain communication with moving satellites without needing to move a large dish now look what happens when I add an object to the simulation.

We have made the beam release pulses to make this easier to see, but all we are doing is turning on the beam. and off and presetting the beam angle here is a comparison of how the same rhythmic pulses bounce off some different objects, for example here is a simple circle versus a complex shape like a moth, you can immediately see that the waves are reflected back to the emitters, but the return waves look very different, remember we mentioned that kco location creatures can tell a lot about what their beams are hitting just from the return, that's why each object the beam will hit will have a unique fingerprint in the way the sound returns relevant to our example when the beam hits a flat object like a wall, we should expect a basically perfect return, little distortion in the signal and it should be loud and clear, however , we must be careful about hitting flat surfaces at an angle because it can throw the sound in strange directions and make it seem like it is coming from somewhere that it is not.

This is also why stealth planes always look so angular, it's so that when radar waves hit them, they are shot at strange angles that the antennas can After having played with the speaker while we were building this, I can say with trust that all these effects are very real for the good of our project. All emitters are in phase, meaning they are all transmitting exactly. the same thing at exactly the same time, so the beam is mainly focused forward this way, we have to manually use our head to direct the beam, which should help better link the environmental response in our brain.

Now this is all very well, but we sorted it out. We still have a problem, we have a focused ultrasound beam, but humans can't hear the ultrasound, that's literally how ultrasound is defined, so how do we know when the beam hits something and make it more usable for humans? humans? that's the magic of frequency mixing here is a very crude example. I'm on an audio program called audacity and it allows me to generate simple single frequency tones, for example here is 440 Herz which is one note now. I apologize in advance to our young people. For viewers, the next part is going to be annoying.

I've set up three sounds for this demo. These two are 19khz and 18khz respectively. They are quite high pitched and older viewers may not even be able to hear the tones. Here is 19 khz. and here they are 18 khz and finally here they are together now look what happens when I turn on the third track which is 1 Hertz suddenly it makes a whole range of noises that all of you should be able to hear now when you combine pure tones. It will mix to form harmonics at frequencies it didn't start with, so some high frequency sounds mixed together can produce low frequency noises if you mix them correctly, this is the trick of parametric speakers, the electronics process the sounds coming from a audio source. like a telephone and then deconstructs it into a series of ultrasound tones which, when added together, add up and mix back into the original sound, but for the waves to mix they must hit something, which is why the sound appears to come from of the wall or object that the lightning hits or, in the case that it is aimed directly at you, it sounds like the sound is coming from inside your head, which is a super strange experience, even looking directly at the speaker, it doesn't It is obvious that that is where the sound is heard.

It comes because it sounds inside you again now. I must say that we did not invent or design this speaker. We got it as a kit from a Japanese supplier on eBay. It only came as a bag of parts and some very broken English instructions, but I mean, it also worked immediately with very little manipulation, all we did was 3D print a case and then hollow out a bicycle

helmet

to mount all the electronics and a battery to power it. One advantage of this being synthetic echolocation is that there are no restrictions on what sound to use for your search beam, but to avoid copyright strikes and embrace our inner bat, I've created a repeat track of actual bat recordings. echolocating, so how are we going to test our new echolocation?

Well if we're going to turn into bats we're going to need some prey so we picked out these lovely moth costumes and borrowed a local dance studio so we'd have a big open space to try out, the speaker doesn't have the best range so this will help Let's make it fair and since there are nice flat walls we can try to use them as a reference for navigation, although we'll see how well that works. The way this will work is that the person wearing the helmet is blindfolded. Then they spin around a few times so they don't know where the moths are, the moths will silently find a spot in the room and then the bat, using only its new echolocation

powers

, will have to locate them if they successfully mark a moth, we count that.

As a success, I decided to go first, so the guys helped me put on my helmet, blindfold me and sort me out, so I think I'm aiming for a wall, this feels like a wall, wall, okay, well, that's it the return of the wall. If I turn 90°, that should be the wall. I'm hitting that wall. Okay, so I have a wall on the wall. I found a person. I found a moth. Yes. I found a moth. Well, a moth down. I can find the other one. well oh hi I got someone who was cool I guess I'm assuming it's Ben okay this is a wall in front of me come back too good oh you found the same moth oh I found the same moth okay there's a wall there I think wait there's something and it's this D, did I get it?

Yes, yes, I stepped aside earlier. I made a lot of noise. I thought you would follow him. I thought it was Ben. Yes I know. He's fine. Brilliant. It is a success. Yes Yes. Okay, who wants to go? Then, very well, honestly, I was surprised at how well it worked. Not only was it very easy to navigate, but it didn't take me long to figure out what the difference isbetween the beam hitting the wall or a target. It sounds like the analogy of a flashlight made of sound which Honestly, what I said before couldn't be more apt since it really was what it felt like to use it, but was it a coincidence?

Both Frank and Jonah also took turns and had very similar experiences. First they identified what it feels like for sound to hit a wall. and get your bearings, then get used to the difference between a wall and a target, and then quickly look for a moth, so no, it wasn't a fluke at all, it was incredibly repeatable, which means we have our answer: the human brain absolutely can echolocate. if you just give it the power of the sound laser, which means that evolutionarily all you need to evolve is to make the noise neural circuits already quite capable of handling the data without special modifications.

Also, it was very strange to be on the receiving end and be the Target, not only were there beams of sound jumping around the room, it was very obvious when you were being the target. I can totally understand the panic an insect or fish must feel when hunted by critters that can do this. I think move on. What would be really interesting would be to get someone who is blind and see how they can use the helmet. I feel like as a day to day tool something like this could be really useful and not be very expensive.

Let me know in the comments if this is something you would like us to try in the future now before you go I have something important to talk about merchandising merchandising what is that merchandising come I'll show you open this door that's right you heard the whales we have a new store We've spent the last few months completely rebuilding it from the ground up, so not only is every product now higher quality than ever because we switched to local manufacturers, we managed to reduce the price of almost everything by at least $10. Have you been seeing some of the amazing designs we have now.

Throughout the video, but there's so much more to see to celebrate the launch of the store, we added this new design which I honestly think might be the best one yet and for those of you who missed out on getting one of our Handmade papyri. mummy assembly instructions posters are now permanently back in stock while the merchandise and our amazing designs are wonderful, this is just the beginning for us, part of rebuilding the store was establishing the infrastructure to be able to transport not only the merchandise but also other things like well, like scientific materials or maybe DNA at some point in the future and we have many more amazing additions planned for the rest of the year, so head over to think emporium.com's neural project which will have a new episode in a month. or two and to celebrate the launch, the first 50 people to use the code manbat will get 10% off their order and finally we have to talk about the sauce, the open sauce, which is the open sauce, it's the amazing youtube slm creators convention that started last year. by William Osman and Co and I can comfortably say it's the best event of the year.

I'm going again this year and I'll be joined by literally so many of your favorite creators that I could easily add a few minutes of length to this video. Just naming them all, there will be panels, small group Q&A sessions, and talks by amazing creators and not only that, but there will be a huge convention floor with 5,100 booths this year, booths with what you asked right last year . Last year there were robots, spaceships and more amazing projects on display than I could count, but this year there will be all of that, but most importantly, project applications are open until at least May 1, so yes You have an interesting project that you want to show.

To 15,000 of your new closest friends, check out the link in the description. I literally can't recommend Open Sauce enough, it was so much fun last year so I hope to see a lot of you there and with that we come to the end of the links in this video. Everything can be found below and as always, we'll see you next time.