Who doesn’t love some peace? However, what is quiet to us is significantly different from what is quiet for corporations who use the peace to work — just not in the way you are thinking. After Microsoft, Facebook is now building a second anechoic chamber of its own as part of Oculus Research.
Anechoic means a place that has no echoes. Reaching this state is not easy and involves a lot of sound absorbent material on the walls and springs under the floor to prevent ground vibrations, besides other things. Microsoft’s anechoic chamber for example, managed to reach a threshold of -20 DB, breaking the previous world record by somewhere around 7 DB.
That is also just -3 DB short of what is almost the quietest possible environment achievable according to science. Why? Because the Brownian motion of air particles is also the cause of some sound — and of course you can’t really stop the motion of air particles unless you were to create a perfect vacuum.
Speaking on the topic, Mark Zuckerberg said:
We’re building our second anechoic chamber to perform sound experiments. When it’s done, this will be one of the quietest places in the world — so quiet you can hear your own heart beat.
Microsoft uses its anechoic chambers to do stuff like test the audio devices on its surface range and work with the Cortana virtual assistant. Apple and Google are also among companies that have anechoic chambers of their own to test products and technologies.
Meanwhile, it will be interesting to see what use Facebook puts its chambers to. The most likely usage — considering that Facebook doesn’t have a voice assistant of its own like Google — could be testing Rift and other VR devices in the uber-quite environment.
While at the research facility, Zuckerberg also shared some details about an Oculus glove that lets you type and shoot webs in VR. You can read about that, right here.
