Awesome alarm clock uses parametric speakers to wake you up without disturbing your partner

By Drew Prindle Published April 3, 2015

wake smart alarm clock kickstarter wak oblique — Image used with permission by copyright holder

In the ongoing battle against oversleeping, humanity has devised some clever, elaborate, and downright sadistic alarm clocks. We’ve seen everything from wake-up lights that monitor your sleep cycle and determine the best time to wake you to high-volume klaxons that only shut off when you enter a disarm code. But for all their clever designs, most alarm clocks still suffer from a common drawback: the fact that they’re not designed for multiple users.

When one person’s alarm goes off, the person sleeping next to them has no choice but to wake up too. Most alarm clocks have no way to selectively wake up one person and leave the other person undisturbed. Until now, that is.

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Freshly launched on Kickstarter this week, Wakē is a new breed of alarm that can intelligently target individual users and wake up one sleeper without rousing the other.

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Here’s how it works. After it’s mounted to the wall above the bed, the device uses an infrared temperature sensor and special body-tracking software to discern where each person is lying (without a camera, mind you). When it’s time to wake one person up, Wakē silently takes aim, rotates into position, and then directs a tight burst of light and sound at their face.

To keep from rousing the other sleeper, the device uses a set of parametric speakers capable of focusing sound into a narrow beam. Think of it as a spotlight for noise. If Wakē is pointed straight at your head you’ll hear it loud and clear, but if you’re outside of the beam’s small radius, the sound will be extremely faint.

And that’s just one of the tricks this thing has up its sleeve. While the device is primarily designed to be used as an alarm clock, Wakē’s creators, Lucera Labs, have dreamt up a few other functions that could be added in future firmware updates. With some clever programming, Wake could track your sleep patterns to determine when you’re in REM, then hit you with an auditory cue that helps trigger lucid dreaming. How awesome would that be?!

You can currently lock down a Wakē alarm for a pledge of $250 on Kickstarter. If all goes well, Lucera Labs expects to ship the first batch sometime in September.

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Former Digital Trends Contributor

Drew Prindle is an award-winning writer, editor, and storyteller who currently serves as Senior Features Editor for Digital…

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