Try an Electronic Silencer

The New York Times > Technology > No Privacy in Your Cubicle? By JOHN MARKOFF : "Maxwell Smart's "cone of silence" is finally a reality.

Two people in an office here were having a tête-à-tête, but it was impossible for a listener standing nearby to understand what they were saying. The conversation sounded like a waterfall of voices, both tantalizingly familiar and yet incomprehensible.

The cone of silence, called Babble, is actually a device composed of a sound processor and several speakers that multiply and scramble voices that come within its range. About the size of a clock radio, the first model is designed for a person using a phone, but other models will work in open office space.

The voice scrambling technology used in Babble was developed by Applied Minds, a research and consulting firm founded by Danny Hillis, a distinguished computer architect, and Bran Ferren, an industrial designer and Hollywood special effects wizard.

Babble, which is intended to function as a substitute for walls and acoustic tiling, is an example of a new class of product that uses computing technology to shape sound. Already on the market are headphones that can cancel extraneous noises and stereo systems that can direct sound to a particular location.

The system will be introduced in June by Sonare Technologies, a new subsidiary of Herman Miller, the maker of the Aeron chair, as part of an effort to move beyond office furniture. The company plans to sell the device for less than $400 through consumer electronics and office supply stores.

The two men formed Applied Minds after leaving Walt Disney Imagineering in 2000. Mr. Hillis was a pioneer in the design of extremely powerful computers known as massively parallel supercomputers, having founded Thinking Machines, a company based in Cambridge, Mass., that subsequently went out of business in 1982.

Mr. Ferren has been a leader in movie effects, working on such films as "Little Shop of Horrors" and "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier," and has won Academy Awards for technical achievement. He also developed mirrored sunglasses for Revo in the 1980's. Applied Minds, housed in a cluster of five converted warehouses here, is a technology playhouse for a group of 100 designers who work on projects ranging from designing buildings for government agencies to trying to treat cancer through the emerging field of proteomics, the study of proteins.

In addition to its work with Herman Miller, Applied Minds is developing some 40 new concepts and products for sponsors as diverse as General Motors, Cedars-Sinai Health System, Northrop Grumman, and the toymaker Funrise.

Mr. Ferren is particularly interested in finding novel solutions to design problems. All the bookshelves in the company's offices, for example, are tilted 15 degrees to one side as a way to keep books neatly stacked.

Herman Miller and Applied Minds are now moving toward the completion of a product line for a separate Herman Miller subsidiary, Viaro.

That line, which will be introduced later this year, is a flexible system for reorganizing walls, lighting systems, and power and computer networks in retail stores and offices. Based on parallel tracks mounted in the ceiling, the Viaro system will contain modular components that can be easily reconfigured and plugged into the tracks.

One of the prototypes closest to becoming a candidate for a spinoff is a novel tabletop digital map, about the size of a large flat panel television. The system has a touch-sensitive screen, making it possible to handle high-resolution digital imagery as easily as sliding a paper map across a table.

The system is controlled by a series of hand gestures. For example, to zoom on a region, a user touches both hands to the screen and slides them apart.

Mr. Hillis recently demonstrated the system, which was developed for a government agency (under the contract, Mr. Hillis is not allowed to name it), to a large convention of cartographers in San Diego."