So there’s a new show on A&E.  It’s another crap show about paranormal investigators.  I saw a commercial for it the other day, and they’re trying to make it seem valid by mentioning that the team began at Penn State.  (That just makes me feel bad for Penn State.)

To promote this show, there’s a new billboard in NYC using technology I heard about a couple of years ago, but didn’t really think anyone would be asinine enough to implement on such a large scale.  Once this becomes acceptable, they’ll be beaming dreams for Lightspeed Briefs into my head while I sleep.

Fantastic.

The billboard uses technology manufactured by Holosonic that transmits an “audio spotlight” from a rooftop speaker so that the sound is contained within your cranium. The technology, ideal for museums and libraries or environments that require a quiet atmosphere for isolated audio slideshows, has rarely been used on such a scale before.

Because trying to convince people they are hearing voices in their heads is a Bad Idea.

But, he noted, the technology was designed to avoid adding to noise pollution. “If you really want to annoy a lot of people, a loudspeaker is the best way to do it,” he said. “If you set up a loudspeaker on the top of a building, everybody’s going to hear that noise. But if you’re only directing that sound to a specific viewer, you’re never going to hear a neighbor complaint from street vendors or pedestrians. The whole idea is to spare other people.”

So it’s sort of like sending you an email you didn’t ask for about a product you don’t care about.  It’s not bothering anyone else!  It’s straight to you!  I heard they gave a name to that phenomenon.  Some sort of lunch meat.

“There’s going to be a certain population sensitive to it. But once people see what it does and hear for themselves, they’ll see it’s effective for getting attention,” Mr. Pompei said.

So basically, the guy is marketing to marketers.  No regular people want to experience this, but hey, sooner or later you’ll realize you want to buy his technology so you, too, can annoy people for your various causes!

The irony is that they’re advertising for pseudoscientific paranormal experience crap, and to do so they have to use the most advanced technology.  It’s as if they are their own best reason to not watch their show.

So was it a ghost or just an annoyed resident who stole the speaker from the SoHo billboard twice in one day last week? Horizon Media, which helped place the billboard, had to find a new device that would prevent theft from its rooftop location. Mr. Pompei only takes it as a compliment that someone would go to the trouble of stealing his technology, but hopes consumer acceptance comes with time.

Sounds like it’s going swimmingly so far.

Link to article at Adage.com  (thanks to Warren Ellis)