Four independent sound sources are filtered with large time-varying filters that compensate for motion. The perceived location of the sound remains constant. Possible applications are in air traffic control towers or airplane cockpits, hearing and perception research, and virtual reality development. The sensor detects vehicles approaching an intersection and sends the information to a computer, which controls the traffic light according to the traffic rate. Jet Propulsion Laboratory technical support packages aided Mestech in developing the system.
Additional applications are in airport and railroad operations.
The system is intended to replace loop-type traffic detectors. When Viking landers touched down on Mars equipped with a variety of systems to conduct automated research, each one carried a compact but highly sophisticated instrument for analyzing Martian soil and atmosphere. Viking Instruments commercialized this technology and targeted their primary market as environmental monitoring, and especially the monitoring of toxic and hazardous waste sites. Waste sites often contain chemicals in complex mixtures, and the conventional method of site characterization, taking samples on-site and sending them to a laboratory for analysis, is time consuming and expensive. Other terrestrial applications are explosive detection in airports, drug detection, industrial air monitoring, and medical metabolic monitoring for military, chemical warfare agents.