Communications Media

What gives radio better sound can help block out background noise, increase tonal recognition in many hearing devices

There’s a reason why we listen to music on the FM dial of our radios – it just sounds better than it does on AM.

And this reason also holds true for cochlear implants and hearing aids. UC Irvine School of Medicine researchers have found that improving frequency modulation, or FM, reception on cochlear implants and hearing aids may increase the quality

Ultra-realistic surround sound is a step closer for everyone thanks to a new method that will cheaply and efficiently compute the way individuals hear things.

Currently, creating accurate ‘virtual sound fields’ through headphones is almost exclusively the domain of high-budget military technologies and involves lengthy and awkward acoustic measurements. The new approach eliminates the acoustic measurement step altogether and promises to produce the required results in mere min

Have you ever sat through a painfully unfunny television ad that you knew was actually meant to be funny? Because one out of every five ads are designed to be humorous, chances are that you’ve witnessed a dud or two…or three. What makes an ad funny is the subject of research presented in the December 2004 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research by Josephine L.C.M. Woltman Elpers, a German marketing specialist, and her colleagues.

“Humor is one of the most widely used techniques in

FogScreen is a futuristic innovation that creates a thin white screen of fog. The screen can be projected onto, touched, and even walked through – a sure-fire attention-getter for publicity or educational purposes.

“FogScreen is the world’s first walk-through projection screen, based on our proprietary technology,” says Mika Herpiö, CEO of the company with the same name. “With an add-on interactivity set, FogScreen also allows you to write and draw in the air. It can easily be us

Jay Leno’s comedy routines are helping to advance technologies for distance learning on the Internet.

Ohio State University engineers are using video recordings of Leno and other TV personalities to test software that transmits more information in an Internet video using less bandwidth.

One of the obstacles to distance learning on the Internet is the difficulty with viewing lectures, explained James Davis, professor of computer science and engineering at Ohio State. A hi

All stories have one beginning, one middle and one end. But with MECiTV’s interactive television (iTV) authoring platform, producers can easily create programmes in which viewers choose how the story unravels and ends.

As Carmen Mac Williams, MECiTV Project Manager at Cologne’s Institute at the Academy of Media Arts explains, MECiTV arose out of “discontent with traditional linear recording of political events or anything happening in the world, where only one viewpoint is pres