In a world first, researchers and engineers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have created speakers that are paper-thin and can be mounted on any surface to turn it into a “high quality, active audio source.”
The thin film acts as not only as the diaphragm (making use of tiny domes that vibrate rather than moving itself), but an entire self-contained loudspeaker in itself, without the need for external stators or magnets.
The research was partially funded by Ford Motor Company, who have recognized the significance of the technology in a number of applications. The thin speaker system could be used to line the interior of a cars cabin for instance or to wallpaper a room. It could also be used to a large scale noise cancellation system, for instance, in an airplane, where microphones could measure ambient noise and the paper thin speakers could play back the relative out-of-phase signal to cancel it out.
With the proof-of-concept prototypes built, which sit at roughly the size of a human hand and weigh just over 2 grams, researchers played “We Are the Champions” by Queen.
The research has been published in a scholarly journal called IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics.