Employees of Microsoft do not have only wrong ideas. Hotmail, Live Search, copy-paste of Word, the greediness of Vista, all right ... but some Microsoft researchers are working on a system that could allow simple speakers to send a sound to a particular place of the room ... but not elsewhere!

An array of speakers that output the same sound whith very short delays so that the sound waves overlap: the sound is cancelled out in some parts of the space while growing louder in others.

Ok, this technology isn't new: it's called beamforming and we can read expériences from 10 years ago, but only in ultrasound and radar. Having the same result with music or speech is much more complicated since since the range of frequencies is much bigger.

Ivan Tashev, the project's leader, explains that additional peripherals could track a person's movements so his virtual headphones could follow them in real time. Better than bluetooth! The most complicated part of beamforming is calibrating the system for specific speakers and rooms, since all speakers have slight variations that can potentially cause large distortions. Or reflection on walls or windows. Anyway, the team expects to do it in 3 years and 212 boxes of aspirines.