Cell Phones Zone

Sound Triggered Mobile App

Fashion Week, held in February and September in New York City, is one of four major fashion weeks held around the world.

This year, Made Fashion Week, one of two major Fashion Week venues in New York this week, is using a mobile apps for iPhone, iPad and Android designed to listen for specific sound waves.

These sound waves, inaudible to the human ear, are synched to the shows, explains the NY Times. They tell the app which outfit is on display at any time.

The app will then automatically pull up a photograph of the outfit — taken by a photographer on the scene — as well as the designer’s name, biography and contact information. Users can share the photographs through various forms of social media and save looks to their phones. The app also works for people watching Webcasts of the shows.

The app aims to help note-taking editors and buyers, said Mazdack Rassi, the co-director of Made.

Sonic Notify, the company that developed the technology, has demo videos that show how it might be used. A consumer’s phone, for example, could recognize an audio file at a ball game for an offer. Might be handy for Arbitron’s Portable People Meter, too.

Sonic Notify partnered with Spotify and Turntable.fm to send users of the app playlists compiled by D.J.’s when users entered the rooms where they were playing. People could then vote on whether they liked the songs that were playing. SonicCast is their product suite built on top of SonicNotify enabling broadcasters and content producers to develop content.

In other app news, researchers at EyeNetra, a MIT spinoff, is working on a device that would turn smart phones into eye exam machines. EyeNetra uses a $2 scope that health care workers can clip onto a smartphone. The patient stares through the eyepiece and follows colored lines that appear on the screen. Software installed on the phone translates responses into a measurement of “refractive error,” which optometrists need to make a pair of glasses.

“Our goal, really, is to empower millions and millions around the world by bringing eye care to people’s homes in a way that was never possible before,” says EyeNetra’s David Schafran.

“The phone is actually doing everything,” he says. “It’s projecting the images, and it’s also doing the calculations. EyeNetra’s developers envision a network of providers that would use the prescription to provide the patient with glasses, reports NPR.

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