Yamaha Quietly Shows Off 1mm-Thick Cloth Speaker

Yamaha’s booth at CEATEC featured a few cloth posters with mundane advertisements on them that seem to lack any attention-grabbing oomph — until you step directly in front of them and realise that they’re incredibly thin directional speakers. Whoa!

It’s tough to judge the sound quality from the brief video taken by Engadget, but we’re going to assume that speech is audible (not speaking Japanese, it’s hard to measure clarity of speech) and oddly directional. Even one step away from the predetermined sweet spot leaves the listener unable to hear anything from the speaker. We don’t know much about the tech — the speaker might have to be a certain size in order to work, which would be a bummer for portable gadgets, but the tech does have a ton of potential for annoying the crap out of you with ads. [Engadget]